muii i uiinm«wtMiHMnwif»FHMriiwinw>nwii Mi rgi»iij «»H»Kt»H 




iiUUJUiAltiiiiii 







































Class - "PZ.5 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



















1 


» 




•M ' 












/ 















NOBODY KNOWS 




































































































































































































































































































































































































































V 


NOBODY KNOWS 

BY 

DOUGLAS (jlOLDRING / 


De toutes les aberrations sexuelles, la plus 
singuliere est peut-etre encore la chaste te.” 

Remy de Gourmont 


*' Oh yet we trust that somehow good . . 



BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 

•' - &.,v' 

\ c 




NOTE 


All the characters and incidents in this story are purely 
fictitious. There is no reference to any real person, living or 
dead. 


Copyrighted 1923 

By SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY 
(Incorporated) 


Printed in the United States of America 


BOUND BY THE BOSTON BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 





©CH7 0 5247 


vt v 



TO 

ABANY COOMAR BANERJEE 









NOBODY KNOWS 



NOBODY KNOWS 


CHAPTER I 

Their situation had been on the verge of hope¬ 
lessness for some months past, but always hitherto 
there had been at least something to pawn, some 
books to sell, or a stray cheque for a stray article, 
or a friend who would lend five pounds for the 
sake of the baby. Something had always turned 
up in the nick of time—usually in time to enable 
Gilbert Vayle to wipe away his wife’s tears before 
dinner, to take her to a Soho restaurant and to 
dance at Chelsea. This evening, however, it 
looked as if there were to be no reprieve. The 
tradesmen had refused to supply any more food, 
and the landlord, tired of demanding rent, was 
now clamouring merely for possession of his 
premises. They had accepted an invitation to dine 
at Hampstead, but it was impossible for them to 
go. Gilbert junior was wailing, and they had 
quarrelled with the woman in the ground floor 
flat, who usually consented to “keep an eye” on 
him when required. The ’bus fare to Hampstead 


2 


NOBODY KNOWS 


was sevenpence each way, two-and-fourpence, and 
they had only elevenpence between them. And 
Gilbert had been forced to pawn his evening 
clothes. There was nothing for it but to eat at 
home: a hunk of bread, a little milk, a wisp of 
tea. 

Chloe Yayle “set about getting it” with large 
uncomely tears wandering across her cheeks. Her 
courage had held out fairly well. But this, with 
the scorching heat, the threatening thunderstorm 
which would not break, and the headache which 
would not go, had been too much for her. She 
thought of her comfortable home, the meals which 
arrived by clockwork, the nice maids with their 
white caps and their white aprons, the lovely baths, 
hot and cold. Seven years ago! How splendid 
and exciting it had seemed to be marrying a “man 
of letters” rather than a humdrum lawyer like her 
father. And the dreams which she had dreamt 
in those early days, dreams warmed by a devour¬ 
ing physical passion which had now utterly burned 
itself away! Gilbert would assuredly make a 
name for himself. They would know charming 
people and give delightful parties. And they 
would all read each other’s books. And while 
Gilbert was writing, she would be at work in her 
studio, painting every day while the light held; 
famous too. 

And then came the war—the five devastating 
years—and after it Gilbert’s return to London with 
his unpopular views, his disordered nerves, his 


NOBODY KNOWS 


3 


neurasthenia, his “complexes.” She supposed 
the Government were scoundrels all right, but 
surely he need not have written novels to prove 
it, which the libraries would not circulate and the 
reviewers tore to pieces. And they weren’t even 
good novels! It was all very well to tell the truth 
and shame the devil—if you could afford it; all 
very well for a husband to get himself disliked for 
the sake of his principles, provided he could feed 
and clothe his wife and child. . . . And so many 
men younger than he, even men without half his 
talent, were making money. And the more money 
the younger writers made, the more contemptuous 
of Gilbert they became. Why not? They knew 
as well as she did that Gilbert had completely 
ruined his career. He never would make any 
money now. He had muffed his one chance, which 
was to get in with the Labour crowd, and now he 
wouldn’t even do popular journalism. He didn’t 
even try. Well, she loved him, of course; he 
was a dear idealist and could be a charming com¬ 
panion. What good friends they might be, if it 
weren’t for the yoke that held them and the lack 
of money! 

In silence Chloe thought these thoughts, while 
her boy, aged three, howled with the energy of 
despair, and would not be comforted even by 
bread and milky water. She thought her thoughts 
in silence, and in silence Gilbert Vayle received 
their impact. Of course she was right. She 
wouldn’t be able to stick it much longer. Her love 


4 


NOBODY KNOWS 


for him, her already overstrained loyalty, couldn’t 
be expected to last out until he recovered. He 
supposed that he would recover, but the post-war 
world bewildered him and he had not the will or 
the energy to recreate himself. The task of living 
on his wits exhausted every atom of his nervous 
vigour. Each morning, when he woke up penni¬ 
less, he had to devise some means of raising the 
necessary shillings. One day’s bright thought was 
to scrawl corrections, notes and so forth, in a 
few carefully prepared “author’s copies” of an 
early book of verses for which American book 
collectors, on the strength of his pre-war reputa¬ 
tion, had made inquiries. A bookseller in the 
Charing Cross Road gave him seven-and-sixpence 
each for these fakes. But now he had no single 
volume left of any of the twenty books he had 
published. They had all been put on the market 
as “author’s copies,” and the letters sent to him 
in his days of success by prosperous poets had all 
been looked out and sold, and all the presentation 
copies (sent to him during the years when he was 
an active reviewer) had been sold too. There was 
nothing left, no saleable relic from his previous 
prosperity. And he could not even write. He had 
not written a line fit to print for months, and the 
agony of this was even worse than the agony of 
watching his wife weep, his child go hungry. 
It was the agony of a living death. The joy of 
creation, who could describe it adequately? To 
be a writer, to be young, and to be unable any 


NOBODY KNOWS 


5 


longer to capture one’s thoughts and pin them to 
paper, who could describe that bitterness with any 
adequacy either? 

For a long time now his mind had been tortured 
with morbid fancies. He had enemies! There 
was a plot against him to drive him out of Grub 
Street. He had written scathingly, after the war, 
about the smug arrivistes of the trade of letters 
who had captured literary journalism and infected 
it with their own snobbery and commercialism, and 
they had not forgiven him. When his last book 
appeared they had maintained either a frigid 
silence or had abused him in a paragraph. They 
derided the critics who had praised his work, they 
pointedly ignored him when they advertised them¬ 
selves and their friends by presenting addresses 
from “the writers of the younger generation” to 
some distinguished greybeard upon his hundredth 
birthday. His friends of the old days ceased to 
invite him to their houses, ceased even to recognize 
him in the street. The publishers who in time 
past had treated him with the civility accorded to 
a man with a possible future now considered him 
a detrimental to be discouraged—not good enough, 
because of his preposterous opinions, even to weed 
out their manuscripts at five shillings apiece. No: 
it was no good going on. Nothing to pawn; noth¬ 
ing to sell; an empty inkpot; an empty, aching 
head. . . . 

The meal over, he watched his wife bending 
over the sink in their kitchen dining-room, washing 


6 


NOBODY KNOWS 


up teacups. The tears had dried on her cheeks, 
but her face was flushed and puffy under the eyes. 
She did not speak; and though he wanted to try 
to comfort her he was unable to force himself 
either into speech or action. A year ago he would 
have taken her in his arms and kissed away her 
unhappiness. Now, in his relations with Chloe he 
suffered from the same inhibitions which pre¬ 
vented him from writing. He was dried up, ex¬ 
hausted. And yet the one live thing about him 
was his love for her, his painful and enduring 
love. 

While he sat watching her, sucking at an un¬ 
filled pipe, Chloe suddenly lifted her head and 
turning away from her housemaid’s toil, gave him 
one darkling glance. It was like a silent scream, 
shattering the stillness of the hot evening. He 
shrank under it, turned from it as from a blow, 
and seizing his hat and stick fled into the stuffy 
street. 

He did not know where he was going. He had 
no objective, no hope either of adventure or of 
escape, no volition. He felt hungry and thirsty, 
but he had no money to buy either food or drink. 

For a long while he walked on with his mind 
in confusion, numbed with unhappiness. He 
walked down Warwick Road into Kensington High 
Street, then turned with a sense of relief into the 
familiar, friendly Church Street where in the old 
days he had been so happy, where his prospects, 
years before his marriage, had seemed so bright. 


NOBODY KNOWS 


7 


He began to think of those days, then to imagine 
that his great-uncle had died and left him five 
thousand pounds. It wasn’t such an impossible 
contingency, after all. And here was a little house 
to he sold, in Holland Street. Just the thing for 
Chloe and the baby. He began to visualise the 
arrival of the lawyer’s letter at the breakfast-table. 
The sensations of opening and reading the letter 
were vivid, intoxicating. Now he was half-way to 
the solicitor’s office, now scrambling up the dark 
stairs to old Mr. Cawston’s room. An instant more 
and he had in his hand a cheque for five hundred 
pounds on account, “pending the winding-up of 
the estate.” That evening they paid up all the 
urgent bills. Even so they had over two hundred 
pounds left, and their rent was paid now a whole 
quarter in advance. “My dear Martin”—oh, what 
an intense delight it was to compose such letters 
—“I am afraid you must have given up all hope 
of receiving back the fifty pounds you so gener¬ 
ously lent us . . . But at last our luck has changed 
and I am able to return it. I do so, my dear boy, 
with a thousand thanks, and with far more grati¬ 
tude than I can possibly express. You can’t think 
how the debt has been weighing on my mind, nor 
what a joy it is to be able to pay.” They were 
all written to, every one of them, in terms almost 
of rapture. Gilbert's face became wreathed in 
smiles, so much so that the passers-by, of whom 
he was now altogether oblivious, turned to look 
at him as he walked on with rapid pace. 


8 


NOBODY KNOWS 


After the blazing heat of the day, the gentle 
night air was infinitely soothing. There was 
strange magic lurking in the shadows of the trees. 
Voices, coming from open, cavernous windows, 
echoed melodiously in the stillness, and it seemed 
as if the ugly streets had somehow been miracu¬ 
lously re-created. The swell of happiness in his 
heart bore him on in a kind of ecstasy. To walk 
through this city of romantic glamour became an 
eager joy. Anything might happen! He passed 
through streets of an exaggerated horror, and 
through streets of sheer beauty. The common¬ 
place had disappeared, and he saw everything as 
if through new eyes. He came at last to a bridge 
across a canal. On the left the canal widened out 
into a lake with a tree-fringed island in the middle 
of it, a lake surrounded by tall palazzi from whose 
open, brightly lighted windows came the sound 
of music and of singing. Suddenly, from beneath 
the bridge, there glided a long black barge, fol¬ 
lowed by a second, then a third. 

For some minutes Gilbert stood leaning over 
the parapet, watching the barges creep away past 
the island and disappear into the gloom, watching 
the shadowy water and the shining windows. 

Glancing down from the sky was a roguish 
moon, reclining on his back—a jesting, provoca¬ 
tive, knowing sort of old moon. The sight of him 
made Gilbert laugh aloud, without knowing why. 
Then, while he was laughing, he fancied that he 
heard his laughter echoed in a different key. He 


NOBODY KNOWS 


9 


turned sharply and saw a woman in a dark dress, 
with a gold fillet encircling her fair hair, standing 
by his side. Her dark blue eyes seemed to be 
dancing with amusement, but they were compas¬ 
sionate eyes. “When are you coming to me, 
Gilbert?” she asked, smiling up at him. “When 
are you coming to me?” 

With a cry he stretched out his hands, but he 
encountered nothing save the rough stone of the 
parapet. She was gone. His dream was shat¬ 
tered. . . . 

A great weariness came over him, as he 
dragged his way slowly back. What a long way 
there was to go! Miles and miles of dull streets! 
He wondered if he were going mad at last, and 
if they would take him to a county asylum or 
lock him up in some private home as a harmless 
“mental case.” But nervous as his queer experi¬ 
ence had made him, he was conscious neverthe¬ 
less of a curious elation, the sort of elation that 
a man feels when he sees the first crocuses which 
herald spring. 

When he got back to the frowsy tenement, 
called by courtesy a furnished flat, from which 
he was daily expecting to be ejected by the land¬ 
lord, Chloe was already in bed and fast asleep. 
Her breast, uncovered to catch whatever breath of 
air might steal through the window, rose and fell 
with gentle regularity. Gilbert looked at her 
motionless, heavy eyelids, and at her gold-brown, 
silky hair crushed in a soft coil upon the pillow, 


10 


NOBODY KNOWS 


and suddenly he realised that the woman he had 
taken into his life, whom he had loved so dearly 
for eight harassing years, was a strange woman, 
strange and secret . . . and silent. 


CHAPTER II 


The persistent howling of Gilbert junior, and 
the slow, tired movements of Chloe were the first 
sounds which came to Vayle’s ears when he woke 
up. But instead of filling him with terror and 
depression, this morning they merely awakened 
his interest. He was conscious of an agreeable 
detachment, a detachment which was all the more 
delightful because he felt it to be wicked. The 
misery into which his dependents had been 
plunged was a misery for which he was respon¬ 
sible, a misery which hitherto he had shared to the 
full. But to-day he did not share it. Something 
had happened to him, and with an invalid’s keen 
interest in his own case, he looked forward to 
studying the new symptoms. He felt in a sense 
as if his soul had escaped from his body, as if 
he were living in another dimension. And he felt 
young, vigorous, happy. He jumped out of bed, 
walked into the kitchen in his pyjamas, patted 
Gillie’s curly head, kissed 'his wife like an ardent 
lover and went singing to his bath. Chloe re¬ 
ceived his embrace amiably but without a thrill. 
She, too, was preoccupied with her “case.” 

Vayle’s elation lasted him all the way to Bed¬ 
ford Street, where he had an appointment with a 
11 


12 


NOBODY KNOWS 


publisher. He was so unexpectedly cheerful that 
the publisher commissioned a book from him and 
gave him four books to “read” at a guinea apiece. 
Later, he called on his agent, borrowed twenty 
pounds which enabled him to meet his immediate 
liabilities, and gave him ten pounds in hand. He 
hurried home, delighted. 

Chloe was out with the baby when he entered 
the flat, so he went to his writing-table, at which 
for so many long months he had not written, and 
tried to do some work. The commissioned book 
had long been sketched out. He read over the 
synopsis once more. As he read through the 
headings of the chapters, a clear vision of the 
completed work rose before him. In imagination 
he had already turned its pages. Passages in his 
essay on Art and Mysticism filled him with the 
authentic glow. One of his pet themes was that 
every creative artist must choose whether he will 
try to recapture a beauty already revealed, or 
spend his life in pursuit of the beauty which is 
always elusive, the strange beauty which hides her 
face from her pursuer but yet occasionally vouch¬ 
safes to him those momentary glimpses which are 
his supreme reward. There was a queer brother¬ 
hood of those who chose the harder road. They 
gave all they had. They gave up everything, 
sacrificed themselves and others, in the sacred 
quest. They were a curious lot. Some of them 
had talent and some had none. But that did not 
matter. What only mattered was their point of 


NOBODY KNOWS 


13 


view towards their work and the desire in their 
hearts. Why was it that there should be so much 
hatred between the two camps, those who achieved 
the comforting beauty and those who sought the 
dangerous? The former had most of the cash and 
most of the kudos. Why, couldn’t they be content 
with their orderly lives, their social delights, 
pleasant houses, their honours, their distinctions 
and their fame? Why must they always be throw¬ 
ing stones over the barricade at the unfashionable 
(and usually hard-up) writers and painters whose 
standards were not their standards, whose joys 
were not their joys? It was a dog-in-the-manger 
sort of attitude. After all, they had the best seats 
at the world’s table, and they had an enormous 
press in which to appreciate one another. Why 
couldn’t they keep their pens away from what 
they couldn’t understand? 

Vayle had written “Chapter I” at the top of 
the page. When the scrunch of his wife’s latch¬ 
key came to rouse him from his reverie, he saw 
with a shock of dismay that those words were all 
that he had written within the past two hours. 
And he had borrowed twenty pounds on the 
security of his contract, banking on his past 
fertility! 

Chloe came in with their boy. She looked 
almost lighthearted. “Whom do you think I met, 
darling?” she said. “Miriam Carmichael. It 
was in Kensington Gardens. She asked why she 
hadn’t seen us lately, so I said you were busy 


14 


NOBODY KNOWS 


on a new book. And she wants us to go round 
to-night, so of course I said we would. She 
wanted us to dine, but I told her it would be 
difficult to manage, on account of Gillie.” 

Vayle’s face fell. The night—no, he could not 
give it up, not for all the famous literary women in 
the universe. That was asking too much. He 
could not. He thought of what might happen to 
him as a drug-taker thinks of his drug. It was 
robbing him of everything, to take away his 
dream-life, to incarcerate him with Miriam 
Carmichael! 

“I can’t possibly go, my dear,” he said. “But 
you go, and make my apologies. Say I’m busy 
thinking out a new novel. It’s quite true. Besides, 
she always liked you more than me.” 

“Oh, nonsense, Gilbert!” said Chloe, her dark 
eyes clouding and dilating. “It’s ages since 
we’ve been anywhere together. I was so looking 
forward to it. We never go anywhere now. We 
never see each other as human beings, only in 
this awful pigsty. I do think you might." She 
was conscious, now, of her insincerity. Really, 
she preferred to go alone. 

“My dear, how can I?” Vayle retorted, with 
a kind of despairing obstinacy. “If I’d had longer 
notice I might possibly have managed it. But 
to-night, I simply can’t.” 

“Oh, very well.” Chloe sighed. “If you don’t 
want to, don’t come.” 

At dinner, both Chloe and Gilbert were 


NOBODY KNOWS 


15 


abstracted, both absorbed in their own thoughts. 

“You know, I think Miss Carmichael wants to 
adopt Gillie,” Chloe observed when the meal was 
half over. “But we couldn’t let him go, could 
we?” 

“Wouldn’t it be the best possible thing for the 
child?” Gilbert replied. “After all, she can afford 
to educate him decently and we can’t.” 

“But, Gilbert, we may be able to, some day. 
Your books will catch on.” 

“They aren’t written.” 

“But they will be, dearest. Do you think I 
haven’t the most absolute faith in you? Of course 
I know you’ll be a success one of these days. And 
when you are, all the good work you’ve done 
already will start selling again, and then you’ll 
be comfortably off.” He noticed that she did not 
say “we.” 

“It’s problematical, anyway, as far as Gillie is 
concerned,” he remarked. “The Carmichael, on 
the other hand, is a certainty.” 

“Oh, my dear,” Chloe exclaimed in polite dis¬ 
may, “don’t lose faith in yourself.” 

“I was never farther from it,” Vayle replied, 
with a curious secret laugh which angered his 
wife. He went on quickly, for fear he had been 
unkind to her. “After all, why should one lose 
faith in oneself because one ceases to be able to 
write books? Books are the expression of our 
thoughts and dreams. It is the thoughts . . . 
and the dreams which matter, and one does not 


16 


NOBODY KNOWS 


necessarily lose them if one loses the power to 
share them with others.” 

“No, dear, I suppose not,” said Chloe, with 
rather laboured politeness. She felt that it was 
hopeless trying to understand what Gilbert meant 
when he was in one of his moods. It was just as 
well that he wasn’t coming to Cheyne Walk. She 
felt more herself when he was not present. But 
wouldn’t going out to other people’s houses make 
him less queer? Oughtn’t she to try once more 
to persuade him? No, it was no good. Oh, 
well. . . ! 

Gilbert started out with his wife, but parted 
from her at Earl’s Court Tube Station. Retracing 
his steps, he walked on into Kensington High Street 
and turned into the familiar quiet of Holland 
Walk. The weather had changed suddenly, and 
was become cold and wet. The moon peered 
through the hurrying clouds with a yellow rheumy 
eye. Gilbert walked quickly. He was trembling 
with excitement, his heart beat noisily against his 
breast. When would “it” begin? Would he see 
her again to-night? Perhaps he ought to start 
“it” himself, as he had started it on the previous 
evening by imagining that an aged relative had 
died and left him five thousand pounds; by 
imagining that at last he had “rung the bell,” 
written a world-famous novel, a great imaginative 
work, a book which even his enemies had been 
forced to appreciate, a book which sold . To think 
of imagining a masterpiece as written, published 


NOBODY KNOWS 


17 


and applauded, was to begin, actually, to do so. 
He was carried on a mile, swelling with his 
imaginary triumph. But every now and then the 
spectre of that blank page, blank save for the two 
words, “Chapter I,” which waited for him on his 
writing table, rose before his mental vision and 
shattered his pleasant dream. This evening wasn’t 
going to be a success. He could not get his curious 
drug. And how cold the wind had become! He 
stuffed his hands into the pockets of his shabby 
old raincoat and gathered it about him, hunching 
his shoulders. What should he do? He wan¬ 
dered for a while down side streets, “residential” 
streets, and looked into the brightly lighted houses 
where respectable Jewish families sat round their 
drawing-room tables behind their Nottingham- 
lace curtains. How could they possibly wish to 
show off such terrible interiors, he wondered. He 
was glad when he emerged from the Pembridge 
area into common cockney squalor. Young ladies 
from the Westbourne Grove shops were now 
encountered in giggling twos, followed by their 
young gentlemen—pathetic pseudo-sporting types, 
swishing the evening cane, wetting the end of the 
evening gasper, pursuing romance in their way, 
as he pursued it in his. To think that they all 
had money in the Post Office Savings Bank. Yes, 
they must all be saving up. What for? He 
passed a movie house and debated whether he 
should go in and have sevenpenceworth of Charlie. 
Dear Charlie! He was so familiar that it 


18 


NOBODY KNOWS 


was scarcely worth while enduring the stuffy 
atmosphere. 

Close to the movie house, in a dark street round 
the corner, there lurked a silent, uninviting pub. 
Through the open door of the public bar Gilbert 
could see inanimate male forms lurching against 
the walls with pots of beer in their hands. A 
large-bosomed young woman in black silk, her 
puffy powdered face topped by a magnificent 
erection of red hair, stood motionless with one 
hand upon a polished lever. Behind her head, 
among the bottles and the looking-glasses, was the 
framed announcement, “No Cheques cashed.” 
The saloon bar, the entrance to which was down 
a narrow alley, was more inviting because more 
mysterious. Its windows were shaded by red 
blinds, and the glass upon its door was so deeply 
frosted that the light shone but dimly through it. 
Gilbert turned the handle and pushed. He had to 
push hard because the automatic shutting appar¬ 
atus was particularly stiff. When he got in, the 
warmth of the place was singularly agreeable. To 
his delight, it was a real “parlour.” A gas-fire 
burnt in the hearth, the sofas round the walls were 
covered with red plush. A musical instrument 
which played a tune for a penny beamed from a 
far corner. It was a perfectly beautiful bar, and 
on the other side of the counter was the perfectly 
beautiful barmaid. 

Gilbert deposited himself in a corner of the 
plush-covered sofa and ordered, with great 


NOBODY KNOWS 


19 


aplomb, a double Johnny Walker in a big glass 
with plenty of “splash.” The perfectly beautiful 
barmaid turned her back upon him, in order to 
give him short measure—ten really short ones 
gave her a double for herself at closing-time; 
after all, it was pretty cold, and her American 
teeth ached that bad they might have been real 
ones—then she turned and smiled upon him as she 
squirted his “splash.” 

“Rather dull ’ere to-night,” she observed, with 
the inimitable, languorous cockney good nature. 

But Gilbert said he liked it as it was—warm 
and cosy and not too noisy. Miss Roberts sighed. 
She herself preferred noise and bustle, liked to 
see plenty of the fellows about, chaffing and kid¬ 
ding each other. “Oh, give me gay Paree,” she 
said. 

Gay Paree! Cafe life ... the real sense 
of values . . . the dead-and-buried Bohemia. 

Of course, Paris in the old sense was all over now, 
poisoned by French politics . . . the French a 
dying race. But why did that charming good- 
fellowship among men with no furniture never 
seem to flourish in London? There must be so 
many others working at the trade of letters who 
not only had no furniture but didn’t want any. 
He felt too lonely. After all, what did all that 
furniture business matter? A suit-case, the neces¬ 
sary clothes, a few shirts and collars, a pair of 
brown shoes with some very good brown polish, 
and a nice little brush and pad, these were all the 


20 NOBODY KNOWS 

material possessions for which a reasonable man 
need have any use. Strange, too, how few people 
understood the delights of polishing brown leather. 
Fancy yielding to a servant those moments of 
ineffable joy! But to go back to Gay Paree. 
Bohemia was detestable, loathsome, as one knew 
it. Certainly it was. Sham artists in loud clothes 
apeing their betters, economising, too, in shaving 
soap; blathering about things they didn’t under¬ 
stand; showing off erudition which they didn’t 
possess; really waiting for the moment when they 
could “boom” and so migrate to Golder’s Green 
Garden Suburb and buy a Ford car. Bohemian- 
ism was a disgusting thing erected upon something 
real and obscuring it. That something real was 
the artist’s contempt for all forms and kinds of 
“furniture”—furniture of conventions, of ready¬ 
made political opinions, of “thought” chawed up, 
vomited and reassimilated a thousand times, furni¬ 
ture of family life, furniture of soul-aspiration, 
furniture of “home.” Obscured by the pinch¬ 
beck Bohemian was the radiant figure of the free 
man , the citizen of this world, and the pilgrim 
towards the many other worlds which lie so far 
away—beyond the blue mountains. Gilbert was a 
little ashamed now of his own emotional gush, 
when, as he walked up Church Street, he had 
wallowed in an imaginary “success.” After all, 
wasn’t it better to be auto-erotic, a Narcissus soli¬ 
tary, than to sniff the incense of the flattery of 
fools . . . ? 


NOBODY KNOWS 


21 


A newcomer entered the bar while Gilbert sat 
absorbed in thought. At first he did not look 
up, but after a time he glanced at the new arrival, 
and recognized, to his intense amazement, Louis 
Mathers. The one and only Louis! When he was 
a boy of twenty he had met the great Louis in a 
cafe, as obscure as the pub in which he was now 
sitting, which smiled for those who knew the way 
there, in a dingy turning off the BouT Mich’. 
Paris, of course, had been Paris in those days, and, 
for Gilbert, Mathers had been its most glamorous 
figure—Mathers, who had “run through a for¬ 
tune,” had spent ten years in North Africa, five 
in London as the husband of a rich American, 
and the rest of his adult life in France, in Italy, in 
Spain; Mathers, whose poetry was, of all the work 
produced in the past two decades, most likely to 
endure. This uncontrollable adventurer with the 
sarcasm of a Rimbaud, and (when he cared to 
exert them) both the charm and the capacities of 
a Casanova, had disappeared from human ken 
ages ago. Anyway, he had taken his outrageous 
chuckle, his Austrian hat, and his classic and 
unblushing non-morality out of England and of 
France, and nobody had heard of him since. Per¬ 
haps nobody except Gilbert had ever thought of 
him. But Gilbert had thought of him constantly, 
had thought of him and written about him. And 
now here he was, encountered, visible, audible. 

“Well, young fellow-me-lad,” said Mathers, 
cocking upon Yayle a naughty eye, “what are 


22 NOBODY KNOWS 

you doing in this damned town, I should like to 
know?” 

“Seeing it,” Gilbert replied. “Seeing it for 
the first time in my life.” 

“But you can’t see London from London,” 
Mathers objected. “Now, Miss Roberts,” he 
interposed, “don’t you make eyes at Mr. Vayle in 
that roguish way. He’s a very good young man, 
and he has just been having an intellectual con¬ 
versation with himself.” 

“Oh, Mr. Mathers, you do like your joke, 
don’t you now!” said Miss Roberts. 

“You can go out with her if you like,” 
Mathers continued genially, in an aside to Gil¬ 
bert. “She doesn’t mind on Saturday nights. 
That red hair ought to be rather pleasant when 
she lets it down. Nice smell. I like the smell 
of red hair. White skin, too. Damned fine 
figures these barmaids have. Wonder why it is? 
No, my dear boy,” he went on, pointing his long 
insolent nose in Gilbert’s direction, “you ought 
to see London from Africa, from Italy, from 
anywhere in the world except from its own 
back streets. Come to Italy now. Spit in the 
Grand Canal to show it what you think of it, 
eh? Take a draught of life, man, under a clear 
sky. Forget the furtive adulteries of Maida 
Vale, and all the cringing patent-leather souls 
who prance daily from Chancery Lane to Chis¬ 
wick and hang poor Keats’ portrait in their 
halls!” 


NOBODY KNOWS 


23 


“Such langwidge,” observed Miss Roberts, not 
without hauteur. “I expect the gentleman knows 
how to treat a lady better nor what you do.” 

Mathers lay back on the sofa and laughed. A 
festive lewdness now irradiated his countenance. 
He reminded Gilbert of a Saviour with conscien¬ 
tious objections to crucifixion. He had relapsed 
back upon the beautiful world with a mission to 
put it in its place. Man should not sacrifice him¬ 
self for humanity. It was more fitting, in 1920, 
to make a symbolic gesture expressive of con¬ 
tempt. Miss Roberts had not quite followed the 
argument. Indeed, she was obsessed with doubts 
as to whether he was really quite the gentleman. 

“I go next week to Venice, to sniff the excre- 
mental smells still lingering about the ruins of that 
pleasant civilisation,” said Mathers, heaving vast 
shoulders and smiling—faun-like, with slant grey 
eyes and horned grey hair. “Like my dear 
friend, Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine, I like to be in 
tune with the infinite. Come with me, Gilbert; 
it will do you good.” 

“Haven’t any money,” said Gilbert, hidebound 
in habitual gloom. 

“Haven’t any money!” sneered Mathers. 
“What has money to do with it, when you’ve 
twenty years more life in you than I have? Give 
Miss Roberts a kiss, my boy, and she’ll hand you 
all her savings—and have, as Plato would say, a 
sense of gratitude besides.” 

“You’re drunk, that’s what it is,” said Miss 


24 NOBODY KNOWS 

Roberts. “Never sore you like it before, I will 
say that.” 

“You would, of course, dearie,” Mathers 
rejoined. “But it’s not the truth . . . far, far 
from it, alas! What do you know about drink in 
this benighted town which allows its publicans to 
sell vermouth as a liqueur at a shilling a sip, when 
they buy it at tenpence a litre? No, ducky, if you 
are talking of drink, let me describe to you the 
wines of Orvieto, of Frascati, of Montepulciano, of 
Capri. Let us talk of Nebiolo and of Falernian! 
Take my advice, Gilbert, leave your flat ginger- 
beer of domestic bliss, laced though it may be 
with the meagre vintage of Miss Roberts’ em¬ 
braces; leave it . . .” 

“Well, it’s closing-time, anyway, and ’igh time, 
too!” 

“Time, please, gentlemen,” rang the stentorian 
voice of the potman who was standing in his shirt¬ 
sleeves, brandishing the long pole with which, in 
a few moments, he would haul down the iron 
shutters of the “Prodigal’s Return.” 

“Time, pleasel ! !” 

“See you in Italy, Gilbert,” said Mathers, as 
he departed, with a wave of his hand. 

Gilbert put down his emptied glass and 
stretched himself. Somebody turned out the gas- 
fire. The penny-in-the-slot musical instrument 
seemed suddenly to become inanimate. The statu¬ 
esque figures, discerned dimly in the four-ale bar, 


NOBODY KNOWS 25 

moved stiffly and deposited their mugs on the 
sodden counter. 

“Time, pleasel ! !” He felt unaccountably 
lonely now that Louis had faded away into a 
mirage of Italy. 


CHAPTER III 


Within a few weeks Gilbert’s dream-life, his 
“drug,” had come almost entirely to absorb his 
thoughts and energies. The absent-minded resid¬ 
uum of his personality got through the daily 
routine of normal life with fair success, but there 
Were frequent intervals when, to one who watched 
him as closely as his wife, he was “not there.” 
What it was that had happened to him she could 
not guess, and he did not tell her. Once she 
nearly stumbled, unconsciously, upon his secret. 
At breakfast one morning she looked up from the 
Daily News and said to her husband: “Listen to 
this!” Then she read a paragraph from “Under 
the Clock”: 

“What is the explanation, asks a correspond¬ 
ent, of the appalling increase in the number of 
people who talk to themselves? I am frequently 
being passed in the streets by men and women 
walking alone who appear to be engaged in the 
most animated conversation with an invisible com¬ 
panion, and continue thus even as they glance at 
me. I suppose the victims of this melancholy 
habit are usually persons condemned to a solitary 
mode of life. The worst we do to them now is 
to wake them up to embarrassed self-conscious- 
26 


NOBODY KNOWS 


27 


ness with a polite stare. In mediaeval times, 
especially if they were lonely old women, they 
were sometimes burnt at the stake or thrown down 
a well.” 

Chloe put down the paper and smiled across 
the table at her husband. “Do I do it?” he asked, 
with a blush. 

“Yes, dear, of course you do. You make 
faces on the tops of omnibuses, laugh to yourself, 
frown, put on a society smile and gabble away as 
if you were at a tea-party. I watched you only 
the other day when you didn’t see me. It made 
me quite nervous.” She laughed again, and went 
on with her breakfast, while Gilbert wondered how 
long it would be before he really betrayed himself. 
He was getting terribly “queer,” beyond a doubt. 
If he had possessed any money he would have 
consulted a specialist. Psycho-analysis might do 
the trick! He wondered, with a curiously de¬ 
tached interest, what on earth was going to happen 
to him. 

“Can you give me any money to-day, dear?” 
Chloe asked, breaking in upon his reverie. She 
hated having to ask him, but something had to 
be done. She stood watching him with a spasm 
of pity while he turned out his pockets. He found 
a tattered ten shilling Treasury-note, a half-crown, 
eight pennies, a sixpence. “Can you manage 
with this?” he said, handing her the note. How 
stereotyped this dialogue was become! And “Are 
you sure you can spare it?” Chloe murmured—the 


28 


NOBODY KNOWS 


inevitable rejoiner! He opened his cigarette-case. 
He had two Gold Flakes left and would need 
twenty more—a shilling. He wanted two stamps, 
a bottle of Guinness, and his fare to Fleet Street 
and back. Yes, he could manage it. 

“I hope you won’t think it extravagant,” Chloe 
went on, flushing slightly, “but I met Moyra 
Burden in the Park the other day when I was 
taking Gillie out, and I’ve asked her in to tea this 
afternoon. I must buy a cake.” A cake! Why 
not? Wasn’t it the alienable privilege of the 
pauper with no bread to eat cake? Chloe betrayed 
a nervous anxiety that he should stay in to meet 
her friend, which Gilbert was at a loss to under¬ 
stand. He promised, however, that he would stay 
in to tea. “She admires your books,” said Chloe, 
“and she’s awfully clever. She’s a professor of 
English Literature at the Gurney College for 
Women.” 

Gilbert whistled profanely. “She doesn’t look 
like a professor,” said Chloe hastily, “so you 
needn’t be frightened. She’s an awfully pretty 
and charming Irish girl, and only twenty-eight.” 

Gilbert said nothing, but the mention of Ire¬ 
land was like a breath upon the embers of an old 
enthusiasm. How he had worked, how unavail- 
ingly, how uselessly, to try to awaken his country¬ 
men to a sense of the iniquity of coercing Ireland! 
Day after day he had written letters to the 
papers and sent them off; and not one had any 
paper ever printed. Then he had organized a 


NOBODY KNOWS 


29 


manifesto and got it signed by a hundred of the 
best-known English writers and painters, denounc¬ 
ing Hamar Greenwood and his Black-and-Tans. 
And the meetings which he had helped to organize! 
Ireland to him was a sort of holy land, half-way 
between two worlds. He was conscious of a dis¬ 
tinct interest in Moyra Burden. Perhaps she might 
have news from Dublin, perhaps she would even 
sing some of the songs of her own country. . . . 
Gilbert felt himself drawn back, grappled with, 
held down. The “politics” which had ruined 
his work and sapped his nervous energy were 
getting hold of him again. He felt the old urge 
to go out into the street and tempt the brick-bats 
and the rotten eggs. “The instincts of the street- 
preacher rising in me,” he thought. He tried 
hard to counteract the flood of his humanitarian 
emotions by thinking of what Louis Mathers had 
said to him in the pub. Let humanity stew in its 
own juice. The Manchester doctrine with modern 
frills! Perhaps every nation got the government 
it deserved. The thing to do was to look after one¬ 
self. Number One was really all that mattered. 
The joys of martyrdom were over-rated. And at 
least the collapse of the Continental exchanges 
made possible a migration to Germany, to Austria, 
perhaps even to Italy. No, he was jolly well not 
going to let this Irish girl, this Moyra Burden, 
drag him back into the forsaken paths of political 
“idealism.” He was much too old and tired, 
much too detached, now. The anodyne which he 


30 


NOBODY KNOWS 


had taken was too potent, he had drunk too deeply 
of the milk of paradise. . . . 

While he sat reviewing a ponderous “History 
of English Literature,” Gilbert junior stalked 
impressively into the room. Gilbert senior gazed 
at him with a peculiar gloating dislike. “Daddy, 
I want choklits,” said the child, over and over 
again. “I want choklits.” But there was an 
excuse for not wasting one of his sixpences on 
buying the little beast any chocolates. Hadn’t 
Gillie that very morning tried to stuff Charles, his 
cat, down the dust-shoot? The poor animal had 
been rescued only just in the nick of time. To 
think that he had begotten a cat-murderer whose 
idee fixe was chocolates! Horrible. What could 
Chloe have been thinking of. He shooed the child 
out of the room and went on with his work, 
glowing, yes, glowing with a sense of his own 
mechancete. That was more like it! Enough of 
this detestable “kindness” and “niceness,” this 
overflowing stream of glucose sentiment, these 
sacrifices for principle. He was through with 
them. Chocolates be damned—and children, too! 

In the afternoon, thanks to a scanty luncheon— 
and to his elation at having scored off his offspring 
—he worked with unusual rapidity and concentra¬ 
tion, and all thought of the approaching tea-party 
vanished from his mind. His pen was rushing 
over the paper as it had not rushed for nearly a 
year, when Chloe and her friend came into the tiny 
sitting-room. Before he looked up he finished his 


NOBODY KNOWS 


31 


sentence and slapped down the key-words for the 
next. Then he jumped to his feet with a word of 
apology, and was introduced to Moyra Burden. 
They shook hands with one another, and while the 
tea-time conversation continued in a placid stream 
he took stock of his wife’s guest. She was wearing 
a pointed Russian cap of blue silk, trimmed with 
fur, a green silk jumper and a blue skirt. Her 
prominent, rather startled blue eyes sought his 
from time to time, while the flush of the repressed 
and hyper-sensitive sensualist covered at intervals 
her face and neck. She talked with a soft sug¬ 
gestion of brogue which always disarmed him, and 
she was tactful enough to let him see that she 
regarded him as a “personage.” 

Between Moyra and Chloe, Gilbert saw that 
there existed one of those friendships the nature of 
which is woman’s most carefully guarded secret. 
They “understood” one another, but they were 
curiously shy together, curiously at arm’s length; 
held apart, perhaps, and yet attracted by the fact 
that one of them was a mother, and one a 
virgin. . . . 

They talked of pictures, of the theatres, of 
London, of music, of their friends, of books, and 
then of Ireland. Moyra told of her friends’ experi¬ 
ences under the Terror, of the raids and murders, 
of the shootings and burnings in the neighbour¬ 
hood of her own home, and of the sufferings of 
her friends and relatives. Her voice had the 
peculiar heart-breaking gentleness which is the 


32 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Irish heritage. “That’s the way they get us,” 
he said to himself, half angry at his own response. 
After all, what did it matter, all that? Ireland’s 
sorrows were her own affair. 

When Chloe excused herself on account of the 
baby—wasn’t she throwing them together rather 
markedly?—Moyra went on talking of her home 
and her friends, and about the Dublin intellectuals 
and the Sinn Feiners and their courts. And she 
told him about her long walks into the mountains, 
about the loneliness of Sally Gap and the terrible 
silence and darkness of Glendalough, about the 
long white road up beyond Glencree where you 
never met anyone at all that was human, but where 
you felt all the time that invisible people were 
watching, listening, talking together, singing, and 
perhaps praying great prayers for the deliverance 
of Ireland. And it was so terrible to be cycling 
on an autumn afternoon on that road that you had 
to hurry back all down the long hill as hard as 
you could go, to be in Enniskerry before the dark¬ 
ness or even the twilight fell on you. But the 
grand teas you could have at Enniskerry, whether 
at Collins’ Hotel or at the Powerscourt Arms! 
The Powerscourt Arms was nicer because it was in 
the middle of the town, and the farmers stopped 
their cars there, and you could hear them talking 
in the bar, and grand talk it was too, when they’d 
had a glass of Jameson apiece, or even before. 
For, as everyone knew, the Irish could talk on tea 
or on nothing. Didn’t the Dublin intellectuals 


NOBODY KNOWS 


33 


talk for hours on a cup of tea and a couple of 
potato-cakes? And wasn’t it the grandest talk, all 
about the future of the world and the break-up of 
the British Empire, and the grand things that 
would happen to Ireland when the Republic was 
recognized—the steamers that would ply from 
Galway to New York, and from Cork harbour to 
France, the coal-mines that would be worked, and 
the industries that would be developed by the 
I.A.O.S. 

As she talked, Moyra forgot her audience, for 
she was stabbed by an agony of love for her 
country, the land from which she had so eagerly 
escaped. Ireland was like a prison to live in. 
And yet, if you had once lived upon its soil, it 
held you. England, London, by contrast, seemed 
to her curiously coarse—coarse, and subtle, and 
complicated. The London people were in some 
ways more friendly and easy-going, less suspicious 
and less calculating than the Dubliners . . . and 
yet, somehow- 

She tried tactfully to put her ideas into words, 
while Gilbert squatted on a black pouff, with his 
pipe in his mouth, and watched her, nodding his 
head. She had taken off her cap, and his eye 
rested with admiration on her coiled brown hair 
and lithe boyish body. They were slipping into 
a friendship. . . . But when the talk left Ireland 
and drifted to literature the friendship nearly 
foundered. Had she been plain and spectacled 
instead of young and desirable, it would have 



34 


NOBODY KNOWS 


foundered quite. This book-talk was more than 
he could stand; it had a peculiar hysterical note 
which jarred his nerves. Verlaine, Baudelaire, 
W. B. Yeats—why, yes, of course. Very nice, 
too. But what about jam for tea, bathing in surf, 
the sunshine, grass, mountains and the clean cold 
air? Could she get nothing at first hand? Noth¬ 
ing. He could see that books were her life. She 
lectured about them, lived by them and for them, 
escaped away into them, and poured even her 
sexual energy into reading and absorbing them. 
These over-educated, book-sodden, pathological 
women wanted shaking. Clearly a job for a 
specialist. 

The argument was growing heated when Chloe 
returned to see how they were getting on. And 
now he watched a curious spectacle. He watched 
Moyra set herself to charm them both by the 
exercise of a quality well understood, and deliber¬ 
ately exercised and directed. It was uncanny, 
like the octopus in the aquarium at Naples. The 
tentacles of her charm hung round him. He 
forgot his anger, and he did not want to shake 
them off. When she got up to go, he invited her 
to luncheon in two days’ time. She accepted, with 
alacrity, and she paused at the door to tell him 
how greatly his last novel had appealed to her. 

“There now!” said Chloe, as the door closed 
behind Moyra. Chloe looked as happy as a fairy 
godmother. 


CHAPTER IV 


It was nice and broad-minded of Chloe to be 
so interested in this friendship. After searching 
his mind for sinister motives, Gilbert could find 
none. Why, after all, should Chloe’s motive be 
sinister? Moyra, he supposed, was good for him. 
She was titillating, and annoying, and moody, and 
doubtless unattainable. So much the better. He 
took her in frequent doses like a tonic wine, and 
came after some weeks to find her necessary. 
What was all this Freudian stuff about “spending 
one’s libido”? Perhaps they were right, those 
people, despite their odious language. 

And all the time Chloe watched him and 
smiled. And if he caught her smile he returned it, 
as a boy, conscious of having grown less naughty, 
smiles at his mother. “See what a good boy I’m 
becoming!” he seemed to say. “Almost normal 
again!” He was so determined that his nice 
medicine should do him good, for Chloe’s sake. 
The rejuvenation of the tired heart! 

A little money suddenly fluttered down into the 
flat. Actually a royalty cheque, twenty-two pounds 
seven shillings, and to Chloe a legacy from an 
aunt of four hundred pounds. Some hack jour- 
35 


36 


NOBODY KNOWS 


nalism came along to Gilbert also, passed over 
genially by good-natured friends; and somebody 
described him in a paper as “an interesting literary 
figure.” He felt flattered, and the seeds of in¬ 
tention, buried deep in him, began to sprout. 
Moyra deployed her charm still more outrageously 
—was it at the word of command?—and he almost 
ceased to hanker for his “drug,” his day-dreams. 
His “case” took a back seat: he was definitely 
convalescent. 

Chloe had been right, he felt, to give him his 
head a little. These stuffy English marriages— 
young couples imprisoned together in small flats, 
tied to one another, jarring one another, growing 
dead to one another—were all wrong. Unneces¬ 
sary. He and Chloe were faithful friends and 
loyal partners; they ought to attack the problem of 
their future relations seriously, because they had 
been together long enough to know that their 
marriage had been based on something more than 
passion. The modern tendency, after all, was to 
put the flesh in its place; to face facts. There 
was too much of the “yoke” about conventional 
marriage, and yokes were for animals. Man and 
wife should preserve their personalities, have as 
much freedom in their relationship as two friends 
of the same sex. Not romantic, perhaps, but 
making for honesty and for permanence, for the 
preservation of children from the misery of a 
broken home. He was glad, for Chloe’s sake, that 
she was making men-friends. George Maynard 


NOBODY KNOWS 


37 


Brown—the faithful George of his Oxford days— 
was always taking her to dances, now. But when 
he tried to face the possibility of physical “wild 
oats,” on either side, he ran away from it. Chloe 
wasn’t likely to be swept off her feet, and he felt 
that she was incapable of casual amours of the 
kind to which so many men are addicted. As for 
himself, he wasn’t much good with women, didn’t 
attract them, as a rule. The question wasn’t 
likely to arise. Moyra? A few kisses, perhaps, 
but nothing more, thank heaven. The repressed 
Irish type. No warmth of heart in them; very free 
on the surface, very prudish underneath; the 
charm of the unattainable, certainly. Amitie, all 
the same sufficiently amoureuse to take him out 
of himself, to bring him to life again. Well, let it 
be. Things were improving. . . . 

Nevertheless, though he did not perceive it, 
his meeting with Moyra had planted the seed of 
a “situation” now rapidly drawing towards its 
climax. How clearly, in later years, he was to 
remember the evening when the scales fell from 
his eyes. He had taken Moyra to the “Beggar’s 
Opera”; they had enjoyed themselves immensely, 
and on the way home indulged in the luxury of a 
taxi. It was the first time that he had held her 
in his arms. She was pleased, flattered, unresist¬ 
ing—but without a trace of feeling. Her cheek 
was soft, smooth, delicious. And she gave him 
her lips. Why not? He was very happy, a shade 
sentimental; refreshed, delighted. When he 


38 


NOBODY KNOWS 


dropped her at her flat she waved to him, smiled 
and said, cryptically, 66 You’ll find me a very dis¬ 
appointing person, Gilbert!” 

He kept the taxi and drove home in a mild 
ecstasy. When he let himself into the flat he 
found Chloe and her “faithful George.” George 
was a rather serious, hatchet-faced Treasury clerk, 
prematurely bald, and fulfilled with sound politi¬ 
cal convictions. Gilbert and he had been at 
Merton together, and had subsequently preserved 
a long and lukewarm friendship. Gilbert owed 
him twenty pounds, too. He was so cheerful that 
he could not help greeting Brown almost with 
effusion. “Such a jolly evening! Ranalow was 
in splendid voice. ...” He noticed that they 
both seemed rather subdued. 

“What have you two been doing?” he asked. 

“Oh, we dined and danced,” said Chloe 
quickly. “And then I brought George back here, 
as I remembered there was still some whisky.” 

“Good idea!” said Gilbert. “Have another 
one, George?” 

George allowed his glass to be refilled, swal¬ 
lowed his drink and got up to go. For the voluble 
person that he usually was, Gilbert thought him 
unusually silent. 

“Anything the matter with George?” he asked. 

“Not that I know of,” Chloe answered. 

She turned away and went into her bedroom. 
Gilbert followed her soon afterwards. He felt 
pleasantly tired. It was good to be in bed. 


NOBODY KNOWS 39 

Comfy. He felt confidential and talkative after 
the whiskey. 

“Does George dance well?” he asked. 

“Not particularly. He’s really rather bad.” 

“Is he amusing? I never found the old stick 
very lively, I must say. Are you at all keen on 
him, darling?” he asked, lightly. 

Chloe turned away her head and did not reply. 
He leant up in bed and looked at her, suddenly 
tortured with a doubt which hurt him to the mar¬ 
row of his being. His mind did not work; he 
was merely conscious of excruciating pain. So it 
had come at last, what he had for so long subcon¬ 
sciously anticipated. 

He laid a hand on Chloe’s shoulder. 

“Are you in love with him?” he managed to 
say, at last. His mouth was become dry, and his 
lips seemed glued together. He could not swallow. 
He did not know what had happened to all his 
“modern” ideas. Chloe buried her head in her 
pillow, nodded in answer to his question, and 
began to weep silently. 

“How long have you . . . known it?” 

“Only a little while, Gilbert. About a fort¬ 
night. I didn’t mean to tell you . . . yet.” 

“Not until you had got me entangled with the 
unfortunate Moyra.” 

“I knew you’d like her. I thought. ...” 

Gilbert gazed at his wife in stupefaction. “But 
you don’t mean . . .’’he gasped. “You’re not 
going to ... It isn’t serious?” His world had 


40 


NOBODY KNOWS 


collapsed, the ground had given way under his 
feet. He lay back on his pillow, exhausted. So 
this was what the prolonged struggle had ended 
in; defeat, utter and complete defeat. He was 
beaten. Chloe had seen it, and she had cut adrift 
in time. 

“I suppose I couldn’t have expected you to 
stick it out,” he said. The primitive, possessive 
man in him was cheated of his anger. He could 
not be so dishonest with himself as not to see 
things from her side. And yet, there was Gillie, 
and there was the long friendship which had 
existed between them. Were their years of close 
intimacy, the tie of the flesh and the link of 
memories, to go for nothing? He had taken 
Chloe into his life, and through all their miseries 
when they were together there had been a sort of 
home. A bad thing? Perhaps, in some ways; but 
a home answered to a natural human need. It was 
worth sacrificing something to preserve. No wife 
is perfect after a few years, nor any husband. 
“For better or worse”—it isn’t only the folly of 
mankind which the generations have preserved, but 
some of its small stock of wisdom, too. But he 
could not blame Chloe without blaming himself. 
Poverty was, perhaps, a worse vice than those it 
engendered. Perhaps it was the essential vice. 
One couldn’t see it properly because of the senti¬ 
mental trappings with which Christianity had for 
some reason invested it. 

“And Gillie?” 


NOBODY KNOWS 


41 


“George has promised . . Chloe sobbed, 
“if you’ll let him come . . . It’s better than 
Miss Carmichael, Gilbert. We can bring him up 
and give him a chance.” 

“You have settled it all, I see.” 

“Gilbert!” 

“Oh, my dear, it isn’t any use prolonging 
the agony. If you want a divorce you shall have 
it. I’ll ‘desert’ you to-morrow. I’ll even pretend 
to hit you in front of the charwoman. I’ll spend 
a night in the Euston Road. Divorce is more 
conventional, I suppose, even than marriage. 
And at the bottom of your heart you are con¬ 
ventional.” 

“You were my lover, Gilbert,” Chloe sobbed, 
“and George is my husband ... I couldn’t help 
it ... we neither of us could. ... I didn’t 
want to hurt you . . . we’ve always been such 
good friends, dear. Don’t hate me, Gilbert. Try 
not to hate us. At least we haven’t deceived you. 
I’m not an adulteress. George has only kissed 
me once, Gilbert. We couldn’t help it, really we 
couldn’t.” 

Chloe was now weeping uncontrollably. 
Gilbert took her shaking body in his arms and 
held her to him. In their common pain they were 
linked more closely than they had ever been by 
passion. The kiss of parting between two that 
have loved is more memorable, perhaps, than any 
other. 

He left her to sleep, and went into the sitting- 


42 


NOBODY KNOWS 


room and lay down on the sofa, numbed and half- 
anaesthetised. Now at last he felt that he could 
say with the poet: “Ne cherchez plus mon cceur; 
les betes Vont mange ” 


CHAPTER V 


There was nothing to do in the Bloomsbury 
“bed-sitting-room” except to work, to read or to 
sleep. A coloured picture of a little girl in a sun- 
bonnet, with a big blue sash round her middle, and 
one of her arms round the neck of a large collie 
dog, hung over the bed. It was called “My 
Doggie,” and Gilbert liked it very much, ever 
so much more than the photogravure of Royalty 
which surmounted the chimney-piece. Then there 
was a writing-table, a broken basket arm-chair, an 
iron bedstead with a dirty pink quilt over it, 
some strips of greasy carpet and a gas-fire with a 
shilling-in-the-slot meter whose appetite for coins 
became a bad joke. Its red metal stomach was 
simply insatiable! All the things in the room, 
however, were nice and friendly, even the glutton¬ 
ous gas-fire. And in the Square outside there 
were a number of queer black shapes which, when 
spring came, would try hard to be trees. Perhaps, 
actually, they would succeed in uttering joyous 
leaves! Inspired by such heroism, who could be 
a coward? 

Gilbert spent some weeks in the contemplation 
of his room. Its aspect made him feel a little 
hysterical, particularly when Miss Jones—the 

43 


44 


NOBODY KNOWS 


landlady’s sister, who “did” for him—added 
herself to its other beauties. Her head was held 
permanently sideways, so that a large, flat, corpse- 
coloured ear might be within easy access of any¬ 
one who wished to shout into it. Shouting, in 
point of fact, was quite useless. The only prac¬ 
ticable means of communicating with her was to 
run downstairs to the first-floor landing, pick Miss 
Jones’ ancient tin trumpet off the floor, and then 
apply it to the upturned “receiver.” Inability to 
hear did not prevent Miss Jones from talking. 
“*A fine day, isn’t it, Mr. Yayle? Yes, I’ll bring 
your tea up directly. Yes, I’ll do it for you 
... no trouble at all.” It added a certain spice 
to life to guess what it was she thought he wanted. 

There were other compensations. Loneliness 
was one of them. The joy of the sported oak! 
Quite, quite alone. No one, positively, would 
come in. It was impossible for any callers to 
effect an entry. Miss Jones had invariably mislaid 
her trumpet when they knocked; and the violent 
oscillations of the bell, which rang in the kitchen, 
never succeeded in attracting her attention. He 
was so much alone that he could even amuse him¬ 
self by trying to write verses. It was great fun. 
The morning hours would fly past while he 
grappled with the difficulties of rhyme and metre. 
And there were books which might be read—the 
old battered friends which had never been worth 
taking to the second-hand dealer. 

The loneliness of the bed-sitting-room could be 


NOBODY KNOWS 


45 


extended, carried with him into the teeming 
streets. It gave an extraordinary sensation of 
freedom. He could go to the National Gallery, 
to the Tate Gallery, to the British Museum. Why 
not? There was nothing to prevent him: no 
“previous engagement.” He was his own man 
now. If, when he came back to the wintry square, 
the tears sometimes poured down his cheeks, that, 
too, was his own business. He could sweat his 
agonies in decency, like the animals; could lick 
his own sores in private. 

He was rather glad that Moyra, with what 
had seemed almost a sadistic instinct, had sum¬ 
marily dismissed him at his weakest moment. 
He had told her what a fool she was at con¬ 
siderable length and with the utmost affection, 
and—astounding as it had seemed—the girl had 
resented it! He had deliberately got himself 
the sack, as far as she was concerned. But if 
she had been a shade maternal, given him friend¬ 
ship . . . ? It was just as well she hadn’t. 

Rebounds are dangerous. In the end, one falls 
so much further. On the whole he was grateful 
to Moyra for her ingenious cruelties. They were 
tonic. Besides, what woman as vain as Moyra 
would want another woman’s leavings? And 
then there was her affection for Chloe. It was all 
quite natural, and quite right. That chapter was 
over—his “emotional life.” And what next? 
First of all, a job. A routine job for preference. 
Something that would get him into regular habits 


46 


NOBODY KNOWS 


of work by fairly easy stages. Something that 
would keep him alive. A job where you got an 
envelope on Friday evenings, which left you utterly 
and completely free from Saturday mid-day till 
Monday morning. A wholesome, disciplinary job, 
with no damned brains about it; a job requiring a 
little concentration, but no thought. He could 
not possibly admit a job into the world of his 
thought, his own secret world: his real world. 
That he was determined to keep to himself at all 
costs, even if he starved for it. It was in that 
world that he had seen the unforgettable, com¬ 
passionate companion. 

“When are you coming to me, Gilbert?” she 
had asked him. 

When would he find her again? 

The process of getting a job meant the surren¬ 
der of his delicious solitude. These human con¬ 
tacts were like prisons, however agreeable. If you 
walked into them, you couldn’t get out again 
without a struggle, in which everybody near you, 
yourself included, got hurt. He didn’t in the 
least want to go back into one, however alluring. 
And they were damnably attractive—at first. But 
if he were a free man he was also a poor man, and 
poverty was the vice which he had set himself to 
overcome. No more hand-to-mouth existence, no 
more pawnshops, no more debts! Down in the 
mire though he might be, he was nevertheless 
re-made. Broken to pieces, he had built himself 
again. His energies, finding no means of dissi- 


NOBODY KNOWS 


47 


pation, flowed back into himself. The responsi¬ 
bilities which had so cruelly given him up had 
taken with them a weight of years and a burden 
of weariness. And with eyes no longer tired, with 
eyes directed now by an undistracted brain, the 
beauty of the visible world flowed in upon him 
and thrilled him with thankfulness. 

His return—detached, and scarred by experi¬ 
ence, like one who after a prolonged and perilous 
journey revisits his birthplace, uncertain of a 
welcome—was brought about by a casual encoun¬ 
ter in the Charing Cross Road. He had been 
poring over the volumes outside his favorite book¬ 
shop when suddenly he noticed two surprising 
figures striding towards him, one of whom he 
recognized as an old friend called Tobey Walker. 
Neither wore a hat. Their clothes were rough and 
tweedy. They had misshapen rucksacks on their 
shoulders. The girl’s bobbed brown hair was 
about the same length as the man’s honey-coloured 
locks, and equally tousled. 

“Hullo, Gilbert!” cried Tobey, waving an 
enormous ash-plant. “What fun! . . . How* 

are you? . . . Do you know each other? . . . 
This is Prudence . . . We’ve just been discussing 
whether we’ve done with each other yet. Person¬ 
ally, I give it another week, but Prudence seems 
doubtful. .". . Come along with us. Are you 
doing anything? Obviously not. . . . We’re 

going to have tea with Mrs. Leigh-Perins, to have 
dinner with Mrs. Leigh-Perins, to live with Mrs. 


48 NOBODY KNOWS 

Leigh-Perins. You had better come and live there 
too. ...” 

In the tube they exchanged their news since 
they last met, two years ago. Tobey, it seemed, 
had become “liberated.” He was a free spirit 
now, and his mission in life was to free others 
from their repressions. (Prudence’s repressions 
had, it appeared, just vanished during a walking- 
tour on the Yorkshire moors.) People ought to 
love one another as freely as the birds sing. The 
Victorian “possessive instinct” was the enemy, and 
the “broken heart,” and the life-long love, and all 
the rest of that nonsense—paying women’s tube 
fares for example. (“Prudence, where’s your four- 
pence?”) He never paid things for women. 
Bad for them. Insulting. Old-fashioned British 
gentleman idea . . . “The ladies , God bless 

’em!” When he gave up being married (in Sur¬ 
biton, too) it was like coming out of prison. They 
had a barometer in the hall; engravings of cows 
and Highland lakes in the dining-room; a side¬ 
board; a maid with a lace cap, and a cook in the 
kitchen; little smug dinner-parties to their frightful 
friends. He stood it for two years. Gwen? Oh, 
she was still living with the engravings of cows. 
If Gilbert would like to go and call on her, to see 
what he could do, he’d pay the fare. Sent dozens 
of friends down. No use. Very fine woman, 
Gwen; long legs, cool flanks, small breasts, but 
repressed type. Frozen with generations of re¬ 
pression. “Wants a divorce, too. . . . Badgers 


NOBODY KNOWS 49 

me to go and call on solicitors. Hate solici¬ 
tors. . . 

The conversation was become a monologue: no 
one but Tobey could out-roar the Hampstead Tube 
railway. Gilbert was perfectly happy. He felt 
ready to live for an indefinite period with Mrs. 
Leigh-Perins and Prudence and Tobey. 

On emerging from the tube they made in the 
direction of Fitz-John’s Avenue, Tobey striding 
ahead. They reached at last a vast and abomin¬ 
able red-brick villa, with what looked like a 
large billiard-room attached to it. Its name was 
“Belsize Towers.” There was a separate path¬ 
way leading to the billiard-room, which had its 
own door. Tobey gave a warning bang, opened 
it and marched in. Gilbert followed, dazed. The 
room was huge, with a high timbered roof, like a 
baronial banqueting-hall. Round a grand piano 
at one end of it stood three pretty girls, clad only 
in the thinnest of gauze draperies. They were, it 
seemed, “doing” eurythmics. Various other 
details in the room impressed themselves slowly 
upon Gilbert. One wall was devoted to abstract 
art; on another hung some dejected-looking post- 
impressionists. It was all, somehow, hot and hur¬ 
ried and momentary. There was a fresco of obscene 
beasts, ramping through a conventional jungle. 
There was a slab of Reckitt’s Blue in a plain wood 
frame, d’apres Matisse; there was sculpture—tor¬ 
tured human bodies, girls with gigantic haunches, 
“significant forms.” And wandering about in the 


50 


NOBODY KNOWS 


wide bare spaces, like persons walking up and 
down in a field, were young men and young 
women, bobbed-haired, loose-lipped, and curiously 
pathetic. On the huge divans surrounding the 
room were more of them. And in the midst, 
towering upwards, stood the most remarkable 
creature Gilbert had ever seen. She was clad in 
a shapeless garment of purple silk and her large 
fat face was surmounted by a Russian head-dress 
sewn with gigantic imitation pearls, from the back 
of which depended a veil of green silk. A very 
long amber cigarette-holder protruded from her 
lips. Her brown eyes had deep laughter- 
wrinkles round them, her fat throat wobbled 
strangely. 

But before he had time properly to observe 
her, Tobey was introducing him. Mrs. Leigh- 
Perins held his hand firmly, smiled at him, then 
turned to Tobey for his biography. “Old friend 
. . . author . . . never read his books, though 
. . . Bolshevist . . . used to be—not now . . . 
old-fashioned repressions . . . wants liberating 
. . must take him in hand.” 

“That’s fine,” said the tall woman, beaming at 
Gilbert. “You’ve come to the right place here. 
We’re all free. I’m free, too, now. Never was 
when Perins was alive, bless him! I’d a hell of a 
life with Perins. But thank God, he’s with his 
Maker, and he had the decency to leave me wads 
before he turned his toes up. So don’t you mind 
me being vulgar, because I’m good-’earted. You 


NOBODY KNOWS 51 

ask any of the girls and boys. . . . Oh, I do like 
to see ’em all so happy. 

Tobey came up and snatched Gilbert away 
while Mrs. Leigh-Perins—or “Cleopatra,” as every¬ 
one called her—was in the midst of her torrential 
greeting, and introduced him to the three earnest 
and unclothed Dalcrozians. They carried him off 
to one of the divans and grouped themselves round 
him—a red head, a fair head, a dark head. They 
asked him questions and roared with laughter at 
his replies. They thought him the funniest new 
exhibit. Their names were Marjorie, Iseult and 
Kathleen. They had been co-educated at Conway. 
(Not Welsh, though. Manchester. Altrincham? 
Guessed it!) What were they doing here? Learn¬ 
ing rhythmic movement and the rhythm of life 
from Madeleine Michoud, and Child-Welfare and 
Economics at London University. They attended 
lectures! Gilbert began to feel very old. Also, 
not quite so old as he expected. It was a change 
after deaf Miss Jones and the bed-sitting-room. 
What a pity his life with Chloe had not lasted 
out a few months longer. Perhaps this absurd 
Cleopatra might have done something for them. 
But Chloe wasn’t repressed, she was much more 
difficult to cure. She was conventional. And her 
humour was intolerant. What a lonely woman 
she was, at heart—always rejecting the small 
change of human intercourse. Always hating 
where she did not love. Right, perhaps, from 
her point of view. But she missed the fun of 


52 


NOBODY KNOWS 


looking on. The new generation. What the 
dickens did they want? What were they going 
to build in the place of everything they were 
destroying? Did they know? Did anybody 
know? What could they know of freedom 
who did not know the value of discipline and of 
its chains? “Made Free in Prison”—some Conchy 
wrote a book called that. Lot in the title. Gilbert 
wondered how the theme was worked out. At 
this point he had to remove a long, supple, shapely 
leg which Iseult (the red-headed one) was twin¬ 
ing round him with the expertise of an acrobat. 

In the spate of new acquaintances directed 
towards him by Tobey, a gaunt man with a beaked 
nose, a face like a starved crow and curled, 
disgusted smile, stood out. Ha-ha. Dead heart. 
Dead heart. War casualty, perhaps? Got into 
himself and couldn’t get out again. Walled in! 
Was that what he, Gilbert Vayle, was coming to, 
also? Not that! Rather cry, privately, when he 
was hurt. Not dignified, not the strong, silent 
Englishman touch, but keeps you alive, anyway. 
Writers and the musical bunch—all emotional. 
Lot of the woman in them. That’s why their 
brains breed. Gilbert sat near the dead-looking 
man at dinner. He turned out to be Austin Dodge, 
“the chap who made all that money with that 
play, whatever its name was.” A tremendous 
celebrity at the time—social light, too. Never 
done anything since. “Dried up, like me,” thought 
Vayle. “I should like to be matey; but he would 


NOBODY KNOWS 


53 


stamp on my advances. Well, the ‘never was’ 
has certain advantages over the ‘has been’! At 
least, we can’t cling despairingly to an importance 
which we never possessed.” All the same, they 
talked a little in the calm moments between Cleo¬ 
patra’s tempests of speech. 

The dinner was plain, but very well cooked. 
There was a great deal to drink. Cleopatra insisted 
that a bottle of champagne should be opened for 
Gilbert—to assist, no doubt, in the process of 
liberation. The Dalcrozians, restored now to 
bobbed propriety, and dressed in silk jumpers of 
various shades, got up from their seats and 
clustered round him to have their glasses filled. 
It was all like a vast family party of polite 
lunatics. “Cleopatra, Empress of Dottyville.” 
One of the naughty children had already coined 
the phrase. 

After dinner, there was dancing—chiefly to the 
music of a gramophone—in the big studio. People 
wandered in and out. They all appeared to know 
one another, but it was difficult to gather who was 
in love with whom, except from their quarrels. 
Gilbert was not sure that he quite approved of all 
these young things on the look-out for somebody 
to lead them up the garden. They were all intelli¬ 
gent and highly educated. There didn’t seem to 
be one among them who hadn’t read the works of 
Messrs. Freud and Jung and Coue and Baudouin. 
Iseult of the red hair —enfant terrible !—said to 
him, in the middle of a fox-trot, that Krafft-Ebbing 


54 


NOBODY KNOWS 


had taught her a good deal and that she found 
him ever so much more interesting than Freud. 
Whew! That was getting rid of repressions with 
a vengeance. He remembered the much-thumbed 
copy he had borrowed in adolescence; the furtive 
reading behind a locked door. At least the 
younger generation had cleaned up that cupboard 
a bit, though its contents—brought into the open 
—still needed a disinfectant. 

For his dance with Cleopatra only the cham¬ 
pagne could have nerved him. Perhaps, wise old 
thing, she foresaw this when she insisted on opening 
the bottle. Gilbert clutched wildly at her stayless 
back, and his fingers dug into the soft, warm, silk- 
covered flesh in the effort to get a grip of her. A 
mistake in steering (and her waving head-dress 
made an impenetrable screen) would lead to a 
disaster. He pictured himself subsiding, with 
Cleopatra in his arms, onto the parquet. How¬ 
ever, there was no collision, and when the record 
came to an end he steered her proudly into port. 

The springs of the divan groaned under her 
weight, and Gilbert felt himself growing hysterical. 
The contrast was too sharp between the scene 
before him and the life with Chloe in the Earl’s 
Court flat, from which he had emerged. Fancy 
Mr. and Mrs. Maynard Brown in this galere! He 
thought of his vanished neurasthenia, of which the 
affaire with Moyra Burden seemed now to have 
been the last and deadliest symptom. Well, thank 
the Lord, that was all over. His “case” couldn’t 


NOBODY KNOWS 


55 


exist in this atmosphere, anyway. But those 
dreams that he used to have, they were different. 
Those dreams! We are all lonely, even when we 
live in a crowd. All lonely. 

“Do let the children make you a bed on one of 
the divans. They’re very comfortable. We can’t 
let you go now, my dear. You’re one of us. You 
don’t want to go right back home to-night?” 

But he did want to go right back home. Miss 
Jones’s sheltering wing waited for him in Blooms¬ 
bury. He suddenly felt that he must escape im¬ 
mediately, at all costs. His departure was hasty 
as Joseph’s, and like Joseph he left behind him 
an article of clothing. Fateful silken scarf! 


CHAPTER VI 


Gilbert was not long in discovering that the 
worst matrimonial crime which it is possible to 
commit is to be the odd man out. 

The Maynard Browns had been superb. From 
every quarter of the town, in answer to George’s 
cry “A Maynard! A Brown!” had assembled 
beefy bourgeois in defence of the endangered 
member of their clan. They were a great family, 
typical of London. For thirty years the Maynard 
Browns’ salmon-and-shrimp paste had been on 
every British breakfast-table. Twenty years ago, 
as a thank-offering to Almighty God for his pros¬ 
perity, the Ebenezer Chapel at Highbury had been 
erected by the founder of the family. So strong 
in them was that grand old nonconformist tradi¬ 
tion, which has been the inspiration of so much of 
our commercial greatness, that even the younger 
generation of Maynard Browns were unable 
entirely to escape the influence of the Brown con¬ 
venticle. George’s father, though less devout than 
his grandfather, worshipped there assiduously 
upon each sabbath. George’s brothers (South 
Kensington, Ealing, Wimbledon, and Bayswater) 
had all been married within the sacred precincts. 
The Maynard Browns stood like one man no less 
56 


NOBODY KNOWS 


57 


for the sanctity of the marriage tie, and for the 
purity of the home, than for the old-fashioned 
British breakfast (with salmon-and-shrimp paste). 
George’s generation, education at Eton or Win¬ 
chester, and at Oxford or Cambridge, had added 
to the family faith the public school code, the 
honour of the British gentleman, and that chivalry 
which was exemplified so admirably in the person 
of Albert, Prince Consort. It was obvious, in the 
circumstances, imbued with these principles, that 
the Browns could do no wrong. An essential 
nobility clung in their own eyes to their every 
action. George, in the eyes of his brothers, had 
been, perhaps, unwise—betrayed into a generous 
indiscretion by his excessive chivalry. He had 
gone to the rescue of the young matron in dis¬ 
tress, chained to a monster. She had appealed to 
him—to his warm and generous heart—in her 
misery. Was not her husband imperfectly 
solvent? Was he not one of these artist types, 
who are immoral to a man? However much 
George might seem in some people’s eyes, to have 
fallen below the Highbury level, Gilbert Vayle was 
clearly the villain of the piece. And, after all, 
divorce in these days was very respectable. Had 
not the peerage set the fashion? 

With George’s parents the situation was more 
complicated. Mr. Samuel Maynard Brown had 
preached, had spoken upon platforms (particu¬ 
larly before the flotation of some new company in 
which his interests were involved) upon the text, 


58 


NOBODY KNOWS 


“Whom God hath joined.” Thanks to the sternness 
of his morality, he was the chosen guardian of the 
investments of thousands of his fellow-Baptists. 
At the very moment of George’s access of chivalry 
the last and most essential of his companies was 
on the point of going to subscription. “The Lord 
has seen fit to chasten me,” he groaned. In other 
words, it was damned annoying; and summoning 
George to his office, he passed on to his offspring 
as large a measure of the Almighty’s chastise¬ 
ment as he was able to unload. But blood tells, 
does it not? It is also thicker than water. George 
did not distress himself unduly. 

Gilbert, to his surprise, found himself sum¬ 
moned to call upon the benefactor of the British 
breakfast-table a few days after his visit to 
Mrs. Leigh-Perins. With some reluctance he took 
himself into the city and was ushered into the 
august presence. 

“Sit down,” roared Mr. Samuel Maynard 
Brown, smarting still under his Maker’s dis¬ 
pleasure. He towered over his visitor, placed a 
large flat hand upon one buttock and gnawed his 
grey moustache. He wore long striped trousers 
(“Grandpapa’s Sunday trousers”) and a vaguely 
ecclesiastical black coat and waistcoat. “Most 
unpleasant affair this,” he went on, glaring 
at Gilbert. “Most unpleasant affair! But you 
needn’t think I’m going to put all the blame on 
George. I’ve heard from several sources what 
kind of a man you are! And I know my own son! 


NOBODY KNOWS 


59 


George was always a good boy”—a little pathos 
now tempered his pugnacity—“a good son 
devoted to his mother, kind to everybody. Of 
course, he has acted very wrongly. He cannot 
expect God’s blessing on his new life. All the 
same, his motives were chivalrous—always chival¬ 
rous. He couldn’t help himself, I suppose, with 
you flaunting your immoralities before your unfor¬ 
tunate wife! No wonder she turned to George. 
Besides, I understand you write books advocating 
immorality . . . positively advocating it, sir! I 
can only congratulate your wife on her escape. 
There will have to be a divorce, of course. . . . 
There’s no getting away from it, the license of 
your type of man is a menace to the community. 
. . . The least you can do now is to try your 
best to make amends.” 

Gilbert grew apoplectic with rage, partly at 
being bullied by the really distressed and rather 
pathetic figure in front of him, partly with him¬ 
self for having no repartee handy. He knew 
quite well how many admirable retorts he would 
think of the moment he was out of the room. 
Golly, what a family! Whatever would poor Chloe 
do when she was imprisoned among them, one of 
the clan? Take to drink, perhaps or elope with a 
chauffeur. 

Mr. Maynard Brown had not yet finished. He 
enlarged upon the superiority of his generation 
over all other generations, past or future. Then 
George and all his brothers had, it appeared, been 


60 


NOBODY KNOWS 


immaculately engendered. No trace of fleshly 
appetite had ever rose-tinted the relations of 
Samuel with Mrs. Samuel. In the long, sweet 
years of their courtship, their kisses had been few 
and pure, though, “Of course, we hoped for 
children.” 

Had Gilbert not been so angry he might have 
been touched by the spectacle of this proud and 
strong-willed old man, who honestly did his best 
to live up to his principles, and was trying to 
reconcile his beliefs with the action of his son, 
to whom he was genuinely devoted. 

But Gilbert had suffered too, and felt himself 
entitled to consideration rather than insult. He 
hadn’t entered that offensive office in order to listen 
to a recital of the virtues of the Maynard Browns. 
But he was too angry to be effective, and he 
departed from the building trembling and inarticu¬ 
late, leaving Mr. Maynard Brown with all the 
honours of the field. It took him about half an 
hour, walking aimlessly through the clinging, 
choking fog, to recover his equilibrium and his 
sense of humour. There was something over¬ 
powering about this family’s technique of being 
always right. 

Chloe’s aged parents—Mr. and Mrs. Wilson- 
Hepburn of The Laurels, Woking—were scarcely 
less impressive, in their eagerness to stamp upon 
the odd man out, than were the Maynard Browns; 
but they acted with more savoir faire. Mr. Wilson- 
Hepburn received his son-in-law in his study at 


NOBODY KNOWS 


61 


Woking, made him a strong whisky-and-soda, and 
proceeded to behave precisely as a gentleman of 
ancient lineage, indisputably armigerous, ought 
to behave. It was a fine exhibition of aristocratic 
suavity, as carefully studied as the grey Henri 
Quarte beard which, at moments during the inter¬ 
view, he meditatively stroked. Gilbert perceived 
that Chloe had managed her parents to perfection. 
George (thanks to that salmon-and-shrimp paste, 
to his cushy job in Whitehall and his Etonian 
varnish) had been accepted by the family within 
forty-eight hours. Mrs. Wilson-Hepburn, a lady 
of much practical common-sense, made no secret 
of her elation. After all, Chloe had behaved 
honourably. She had not been “unfaithful” to 
Gilbert, and Gilbert had deserted her deliberately. 
Everything showed that Gilbert had ceased to care, 
and wanted his freedom. Mrs. Wilson-Hepburn’s 
manner to George Maynard Brown had—from the 
first—been affability itself. To Gilbert, on the 
occasion of his visit, she extended two fingers and 
an acid smile. The general situation, the Wilson- 
Hepburn attitude, was not lost upon Gilbert 
despite his father-in-law’s charm of manner and 
distinguished hospitality. It was plain that all 
these people really understood divorce. It was 
somehow, part of their system; an integral part of 
the whole Victorian marriage system (on which, 
of course, the trade of prostitution has flourished 
for so long). It was a highly conventional affair 
1o them; fashionable, with rigid rules. 


62 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Chloe walked with her husband to Woking 
Station. She was silent and morose, suffering 
from violent nerve-strain. The divorce imbroglio 
seemed to have brought out all her native melan¬ 
choly. She was intensely sorry for herself, tragic 
with self-pity. Only her fine fundamental selfish¬ 
ness, a quality which Gilbert envied her, seemed 
to lend her strength. They kissed good-bye on the 
platform of the station with a curious outburst of 
emotion for which neither could entirely account. 

This, then, was the end of it all! Every cord 
snapped, every link broken, every tie of relation¬ 
ship vanished. Nothing left between them but a 
child of three, and a host of memories which time 
would quickly blur. It was all so stupid and so 
squalid. The French system—any system that 
worked—was surely preferable. As Gilbert sat in 
the crowded third-class carriage of the train which 
bore him on to Waterloo, he wondered whether 
any solution of the problem of human relation¬ 
ships was likely to be found by Tobey Walker and 
his bobbed-haired fellow-enthusiasts. Poor little 
wretches—pathetic pioneers—testing their theories, 
so young, by the bitter test of experience. What 
would they make of it? Nobody knew. 


CHAPTER VII 


Gilbert might never have revisited Mrs. Leigh- 
Perins strange house had he not left his only silk 
scarf in her keeping. But there it was, and he 
could not afford to buy another. On the occasion 
of his second visit he was received like a wander¬ 
ing sheep who must, at all costs, be taught to 
love the fold. Cleopatra felt inspired to “work 
amongst” him; Prudence and Tobey conducted a 
special mission; Iseult of the red hair made him 
a bed on the divan. 

“And of course, me dear, we’ll find you a 
job!” said Mrs. Leigh-Perins. “We do have so 
many activities! There’s the Freedom for Ireland 
Society, and the Jugo-Slavian Babies, and the 
reformed Diet Information Bureau, and the Sanity 
and Sex Group, and the Mother’s Magna Charta, 
the Divorce Law Reformers, and the University 
Communists—and I don’t know what all. I know 
there’s something going in the Jugo-Slavian 
Babies: and of course there’s always a vacancy in 
the Reformed Diet. But there, you eat and drink 
so healthy you wouldn’t like that would you? But 
you must have a room here, whatever happens. 
You’ll be more comfy than in that Bloomsbury, 
and cheaper. I make all the boys and girls pay 
63 


64 


NOBODY KNOWS 


a pound a week. It’s easier for all of us. Then 
I feel it’s you that’s doing me the favour. . . . Oh, 
I do wish I could make everyone happy, but I don’t 
know as it’s reelly right the way I’m going about 
it. Sometimes I’m that worried over it all. But 
I don’t know. Nothing could be worse than a 
marriage with no love in it. They start all right 
—and then look at it! That American woman 
knew what she was about who came over here 
last year and said everybody ought to have jobs. 
That’s the secret! Jobs and latchkeys. Nobbut 
what Dr. Marie Stopes has done her bit too, 
though somehow the poitry doesn’t seem to mix. 
Science or slush. You can’t have it both ways in 
the one book, can you now? I dunno. If only all 
the young things could be happier than I was. Not 
that I want to run down Perins, you understand. 
Especially him having done the decent in the end 
and left me all this rhino. Though I grant you he 
hadn’t anyone else to leave it to, him quarrelling 
all the time with all his family. Still, you know 
what I mean.” 

Cleopatra took longer to run down into silence 
than any of her gramophone records; but Gilbert 
felt no impatience. He could have listened for 
hours to her inexhaustible flow. It was evident 
that she had a heart as large as the rest of her 
anatomy, and her humility was disarming. Once, 
after he had been installed in the house for a week 
or two, Gilbert found her weeping over one of 
Tobey’s socks, because she hadn’t been able to 


NOBODY KNOWS 


65 


understand his tail-talk about psycho-analysis and 
felt she was too old to “learn it all up.” He 
gave her a filial hug and told her that he certainly 
didn’t understand all that bunkum himself, and 
that Tobey didn’t either; and what did it matter, 
anyway? Poor Cleopatra! No mother ever 
strove more selflessly or more humbly to be good 
to her children. 

When the promised job materialized it turned 
out to be partly the Jugo-Slavian Babies and partly 
the Freedom for Ireland Society. The two organ¬ 
isations shared office-accommodation in Smith 
House, Westminster, and had an interchangeable 
committee, presided over by the indefatigable 
Lord Corfe. Gilbert’s task was to get printed and 
distributed the abundant “free literature” issued 
by the two societies, to attend the committee meet¬ 
ings and write the minutes, and to interview 
callers. The callers were mostly the rather strident 
young women who, from an office on the floor 
above, directed the operations of the Reformed 
Diet Information Bureau (the “R.D.I.B.”) and 
the Sanity and Sex Group (the “S.S.G.”). There 
Was also the secretary of an important annexe 
to the S.S.G., known to the lift-boy as “them 
venereals.” She was a highly starched lady named 
Miss Lucilla Lampeter, late of Newham. She 
wore hom-rimmed spectacles, had written a novel, 
and had an inordinate appetite for statistics about 
the Jugo-Slavian Babies. Gilbert became terrified 
when, upon their third meeting, she touched lightly 


66 


NOBODY KNOWS 


upon literature. He knew it was coming, and it 
came. One day, with a slight and not unbecoming 
flush, Miss Lampeter deposited a copy of her 
“little book” upon his desk. 

One of the bobbed-haired “Sanity and Sex” 
girls saw her doing it, too; and pounced upon 
the volume as soon as Miss Lampeter had left the 
room. Her name was Dorothy Dawson. She was 
a red-faced ex-land-girl whose sexual sanity caused 
Gilbert as much uneasiness as Miss Lampeter’s 
spinster-like coyness. He felt frail as a lily in 
her presence. 

“Whew! she calls it a ‘little book,’ does she? 
Silly swank! Five hundred pages of Newham 
tosh. Makes you want a double Scotch and soda, 
the very sight of the damn thing. Give us a 
gasper, Gilbert, there’s a good fellow.” Miss 
Dawson banged together the covers of “The Soul 
on the Hill-Top,” and dropped it into the waste- 
paper basket. 

What was one to do about her? Could one 
take a young thing, daughter of an archdeacon, 
employed by a committee of earnest good-workers 
presided over by a High Church peer, into a bar 
and give her a drink? Or did she want to go for a 
week-end walking-tour and have “free relations”? 
Gilbert sweated at the prospect. In the old days, 
before the country was burdened with two million 
surplus but emancipated females, the god pursued 
and the maiden hid. It was more fun that way, 
because there was more “sin.” Now sin, in the 


NOBODY KNOWS 


67 


old sense of the word, had disappeared. It had all 
been exposed and spring-cleaned by these vigorous 
young reformers with their courage, and their 
honesty, and their splendid hopefulness. 

“It is all very well,” said Gilbert, “but you 
had better take care that you don’t sweep away 
with it its counterpart—virtue.” 

“That’s utter rot,” Dorothy retorted, sitting 
down on a pile of free literature describing the 
sorrows of the Jugo-Slavian Babies, and lighting a 
cigarette. “You’re an old fogey, Gilbert. A nasty 
old back-number. You ought to face sex frankly 
and put it in its proper place.” 

“But what is its proper place? I don’t know. 
Do you? Now, don’t go and recite all your sanity 
and sex pamphlets. I’ve read them all, and they 
tell me nothing. You see, I’ve had some years of 
practical experience.” 

“Oh, I know, poor old thing, you’ve been 
through it . . . and got hurt. Surely you must 
see there’s a better way than all that marriage and 
divorce nonsense? Sex ought to come quite 
naturally; a spontaneous expression of people’s 
feelings for one another. It ought to come as 
naturally as a kiss. And when a baby happens, 
the mother ought to be endowed until she is able 
to work again; and the baby ought to be brought 
up in the State nursery until the mother is able to 
look after it. ...” 

“M’y yes,” said Gilbert, doubtfully. “It 
sounds all right. When there’s a State nursery, 


68 


NOBODY KNOWS 


and when both sexes are thoroughly emancipated 
from their own possessive instincts, your ideals 
may be realized. But it will be easier to build 
State nurseries than to alter human nature. All 
you children try to pretend that you have the same 
sexual natures as your men. You haven’t; you 
never will have; and unless you are fools you 
won’t want to have. Man is a polygamous brute, 
but that doesn’t incapacitate him from being, at the 
same time, faithful and devoted. If the average 
decent woman tries to imitate his roving and 
adventurous promiscuity, she is done for. Only 
women of quite exceptional character and tempera¬ 
ment can make a success of that kind of thing. 

. . . Your talk about love coming as naturally as 
a kiss is nonsense, my dear, as you may very soon 
discover ...” 

“That’s right,” Dorothy broke in. “Now we’ve 
got it! You want one law for the woman and 
another for the man.” 

“I do,” said Gilbert. “Just as I agree there 
should be one law for the rich and another for the 
poor! I’m ten years in advance of you progres¬ 
sives, because in regard to first principles I’ve 
got back to my grandmother already; and it 
will take you at least another decade to complete 
the circle.” 

“Beast!” said Dorothy. “I hate you.” 

“Come here and give me a kiss, then,” Gilbert 
replied. “It will be quite natural; and it won’t 
hurt a bit.” 


NOBODY KNOWS 


69 


Dorothy jumped up from her pamphlets, seized 
Gilbert round the waist with her strong young 
arms and gave him a resounding kiss upon the 
lips. She laid her bobbed head for a moment on 
his shoulder, then kissed him again on the neck, 
just below his left ear. “It’s time I went and did 
some work,” she remarked, after a pause. Then 
she ran quickly from the room without another 
word. 

Gilbert dropped limply into Lord Corfe’s arm¬ 
chair and gazed in bewilderment at the shut door. 
Then he laughed aloud; and then was silent. . . . 

It was time to close the office. He went out to 
the nearest public-house and bought himself a 
lonely and meditative drink. Dorothy’s kiss had 
been an invitation. Was there any point in cling¬ 
ing to principles which she herself had discarded, 
and giving her a priggish and ungallant refusal? 
Perhaps, after all, the girl was right. Perhaps 
. . . He felt bewildered, in a world without com¬ 
mandments. 


CHAPTER VIII 


“I suppose I shall have to go forth into the 
streets, Tobey,” Gilbert remarked some weeks 
later, “and search for a bad woman.” 

Tobey stared at his friend. “Whatever for?” 
he asked, in genuine amazement. “You don’t 
mean to say you are going to hire a prostitute as 
‘evidence’?” 

“Why not? It’s their job. Why ever shouldn’t 
they do a little legitimate business once in a while, 
and receive a proper fee for their trouble? I 
shall find a nice fat one, who plays double-dummy 
bridge. Then with a bottle of whisky between 
us we shall get through the night quite com¬ 
fortably.” 

“But why don’t you take Iseult away for the 
week-end? She’s obviously keen on you. Or 
Prudence? Prudence would love it. She and I 
wound things up about a fortnight ago. She’s 
such a dear. You’d like her. And she’d darn 
all your socks and mend all your clothes for 
you. As you are the guilty party and won’t 
defend, there’s no need for any publicity. I 
couldn’t spend a night alone in a room with one 
of those women, even under the most platonic 
conditions. . . .” 


70 


NOBODY KNOWS 


71 


“You mean you are so damned stingy, Tobey, 
that you wouldn’t spring a fiver for her profes¬ 
sional services. My God, what a damned, dirty, 
squalid atmosphere it is. The Divorce Court, and 
everything to do with it, stinks like a cloaque. 
I’m almost converted to all your silly views on 
marriage. Perhaps I would be quite: if I didn’t 
live in this house.” 

Gilbert made himself a drink and lay back 
against the pile of mauve cushions on his black 
divan. Tobey, stroking his honey-coloured hair, 
watched derisively from the arm-chair. 

“What’s the matter with the house?” 

“It swarms so. Not masculine enough for me. 
I’m not sure that the new promiscuity isn’t a 
thousand times worse than the old stuffy and badly 
ventilated Victorian marriage. I don’t believe in 
women lowering their price, or in men lowering 
their standards. In fact, Tobey, I’m not a 
womaniser like you; and I hate living in a 
crowd.” 

“You haven’t any real communal feeling,” 
said Tobey. “That’s what is the matter with you. 
You’ve got a smug bourgeois basis, with great 
streaks and layers of nonconformist humbug in 
your mental make-up. You don’t understand the 
joy of life.” 

“Damn it, how much longer do you think you 
are going to keep up this ‘joy of life’ stunt, run¬ 
ning about with young things half your age! Do 
you realise that we’re both of us nearly forty? 


72 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Hang it all. The age of consent, for people like 
you, Tobey, ought to be fixed at your own age, 
thirty-five. Your only chance is to be married by 
a musical virago, with an eye to your expectations. 
She’d keep you in order, shoo away the bobbed¬ 
haired children, and make you work. You’d love 
it.” 

Tobey shuddered. “Gwen answered that 
description all too accurately. You’ve forgotten 
the barometer, and the dining-room sideboard, and 
the awful dinner-parties. No. You’ve got a 
slave mind, my dear, and no one can save you, 
though we’ve done our best. Why, you are a 
comparatively sensible human being now. When 
Prudence and I found you in the Charing Cross 
Road, you were a morbid, neurasthenic wreck, a 
decayed mass of complexes and neuroses. Both 
Prudence and I diagnosed you at once as suffering 
from tertiary matrimony. You ought to be very 
grateful.” 

“I am grateful, Tobey,” said Gilbert. “I dis¬ 
approve of you thoroughly, but I love you all the 
same. And now, for the love of heaven, let’s go 
out somewhere and get tight. Come on. The 
Cafe? Haven’t been there for years.” 

But it was not so easy to steer the inflammable 
Tobey into the street. Iseult, encountered in the 
hall, had on a new jumper. Marjorie was cheeky 
and ran away on sandalled feet, asking for pur¬ 
suit. Prudence, with dog-like eyes (so full of 


NOBODY KNOWS 


73 


suffering that they might have wrung the heart of 
a Landru), emerged from her room with a pair of 
mended socks, and had to be cheered up. How¬ 
ever, at last Tobey allowed himself to be dragged 
to the front door; and they proceeded by way of 
the Hampstead Tube to Piccadilly Circus. 

The fog of tobacco smoke which hung over the 
drinkers in the Cafe seemed thicker than ever as 
Gilbert and Tobey Walker stood blinking at them 
in the doorway. As usual, the place was crowded, 
and they had difficulty in finding seats. Gilbert 
ordered himself and Tobey a double whisky in 
order to blur the surroundings as quickly as pos¬ 
sible. No sane person could bear the Cafe for five 
minutes unless he had taken drink or was doped. 
The whisky warmed and mellowed them, and they 
began to examine the room for familiar faces. On 
the bench opposite them sat huddled an apparently 
decayed mass of human remains. There were 
five or six bodies, two dented, perilously poised 
bowlers, a “trilby,” some dank black hair. On 
the marble table, in front of the bodies, were three 
half-finished glasses of stout, an overturned bottle 
of Schweppe’s soda water, two empty whisky 
glasses. After a few minutes a small eye opened 
on the extreme right. Then a faint shiver ran 
through the half-dozen once-human organisms. 
Then a husky voice came from the extreme left. 
“Hullo, Gilbert old man. Got the price of a drink 
on you?” 

Gilbert looked at Mario, the waiter. Mario, 


74 


NOBODY KNOWS 


bland and all-knowing, shook his head emphati¬ 
cally. Gilbert shook his head too, and smiled. 
“Sorry, old man.” There was a pause. Suddenly 
the decayed bodies became galvanised into action. 
Life returned to them. The mass separated into 
its component parts. The dead faces opened 
furious, fish-like, filmy eyes. Lips yellow with 
nicotine, parted, and from slimy mouths void of 
saliva, words issued huskily, at torrential speed. 

“You’re a bloody swine, Gilbert; that’s what 
you are. You know you’ve got it on you, blast 
you. Be a sport, damn it!” 

Gilbert fell. After all, he had the price on him, 
though God knew how he was to make it up in the 
morning. Mario, wise ineffably, brought small 
lagers. Artificial saliva was provided. Part of the 
mass fumbled with a notebook, tore a sheet from 
it, scrawled a few words, twisted it, and gave it to 
the waiter. “What’s the good of having a bloody 
wife?” he hiccoughed. The waiter took the slip 
of paper, grinned philosophically at Gilbert and 
walked over to a pretty girl (not in her first youth) 
sitting next to a young man in evening clothes who 
had the gummy heroin eye. He handed her the 
twisted paper. The girl read it, waved her hand, 
laughed, blew a kiss. The waiter returned with 
a ten shilling Treasury-note. “Blast her!” said 
the husband. “A green one!” To the confusion 
of Gilbert and Tobey, potent drinks were now 
irresistibly ordered. 

“What are they all?” Tobey gasped. 


NOBODY KNOWS 


75 


“Painters and poets,” said Gilbert. “Don’t 
you know? This is it. These are they!” He 
Was intoxicated with squalor. The rich fumes of 
depravity unnerved him. Down in the pit. Wal¬ 
lowing. The gutter. Would the stars shine out 
with unendurable brightness? Yes. A double gin 
and tonic! 

This was a new side to Gilbert. Tobey glanced 
at him suspiciously, then looked round for some 
way of escape. By Jove, yes. Over there was 
Betty Carson and another girl, with those two men 
from King’s College. Repressed types all of 
them. The girls caught his eye and smiled at 
him. Tobey at once felt a sense of mission. “I 
must go over and talk to Betty Carson,” he said. 
After all, this was Gilbert’s night out. Tobey 
decamped, eye inflamed, torvo oculo . . . . 

One of the mass leant forward across the table 
to Gilbert. “It’s all right, old boy,” he whispered. 
“Here’s Webster Levy . . . Hullo, Webster. 

Room here . . . yes.” (Sotto voce) “Tons of 
money. Painting his portrait. Sit where you are, 
Gilbert. Awful head to draw. Only paying me 
twenty. Got a wife worse than himself. My God, 
I hate this Cafe! I only care for my art, old boy. 
That’s all I really live for. Thank goodness, I 
remembered to steal a dozen tubes of paint from 
John’s studio the last time I was there. Couldn’t 
have started this job otherwise.” 

Webster beamed, unseeing. This was Bohemia, 
was not it? His friends were a bit odd, but how 


76 


NOBODY KNOWS 


proud he was to be called Webster by known 
people! Drinks? Bless their hearts. Of course. 
Double gins and tonics. 

“Mr. Vayle—Mr. Webster Levy.” 

“Pleased to meet you, sir. Mr. Gilbert 
Vayle?” (“Sensation in Court,” muttered Gilbert, 
beaming.) 

Gilbert extended a trembling hand, fervent 
with alcoholic stimulation. 

The once inanimate mass of decayed humanity 
was now all liveliness and chatter. Mario beamed. 
Mr. Levy beamed. The happy husband beamed. 
The gins had done their work. 

The portrait-painter waxed lyrical. Art was 
his theme. The wonderful life of the artist! He 
was a priest, a king. He came to the Cafe to 
drown the horror and the ugliness of life. The 
artist was the seer. ... “I will, Webster. Same 
again. ...” 

“Yours, Mr. Vayle?” 

“Thanks, yes,” said Gilbert. 

Gins and tonics all round. 

What was Orpen anyway? Damned bad com¬ 
mercial artist. John was all right, once. Spoiled 
by prosperity. All these fellows the same. . . . 

Gilbert sweated and looked across the room at 
Tobey, who watched him anxiously. “Sorry, 
Tobey,” he thought, “but I did come out to get 
tight, didn’t I?” 

He was not quite pickled yet, though. 

A row happened between some drunken 


NOBODY KNOWS 


77 


bookies. The men, fat and panting, leapt at each 
other’s throats. Fur-clad ladies, with impressive 
balcons , became tearful. Glasses broke, veins 
stood out, chairs fell over, waiters dashed up, the 
chucker-out functioned. The group stirred not a 
hair. 

“Art—that’s all life is,” the portrait-painter 
continued, unmoved, fixing his half-empty glass 
with black emotional eye. 

Mr. Levy (not in the art business: in whole¬ 
sale onion importing) wondered what he could do 
to show his gratitude. More drinks? 

Closing time. Lowered lights. Tobey flashing 
by with the nice girls, and the university students 
following, speechless. Lucky Tobey! Relapse 
of the group into a huddle of inanimate forms. 
Gilbert felt released. Ginny. Lovely feeling. 
Night yet young. The chucker-out menaced. 
“Long past time, gentlemen.” 

Mr. Levy’s naivete remained undinged. He 
sipped his light lager. What could he do? 
Weren’t they nice to him? Real painters! Well- 
known men! Gilbert’s heart would have bled for 
Mr. Levy, but his gins and tonics had staunched the 
flow. Instead, he watched. “I say, you chaps,” 
said Mr. Levy at last. (Could he call them 
“chaps”?) “I know a place . . . Taxis . . . 
all of us . . . not far.” 

The mass recovered its animation. The saliva¬ 
less mouths uttered words. “Good old Webster. 
One of the best.” 


78 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Through the middle door they trooped, and out 
of the middle door. Through the swing-doors 
they banged and out of them, Mr. Levy still 
ecstatic. The commissionaire whistled for the 
taxis. The taxis came. They filled up, but 
Gilbert dodged them. The party drove off, con¬ 
scious of his absence, fiercely resenting it. “Be a 
sport,” shouted Levy’s protege. “Come on, 
Gilbert,” yelled the pretty lady’s husband, putting 
his head through the open window of his cab. But 
Gilbert wouldn’t come on. He couldn’t, though 
he was ashamed of himself for not doing so. He 
was restrained by an overmastering determination. 
“Got to find bad woman,” he murmured to him¬ 
self, turning up Regent Street towards Oxford 
Circus. “Got to find bad woman.” 


CHAPTER IX 


The drink went off him in the cold raw air. 
Gilbert’s mind became unnaturally clear, and his 
body, save for his legs, which were a trifle out of 
control, gave no trouble. He walked quickly up 
Regent Street, his hands stuffed into the pockets 
of his raincoat, his stick dangling from one arm. 
At one moment he felt absurdly elated, hilarious, 
ginny: at another he sank into a trough of 
depression. When he reached the top of the 
street, with the intention of making for the 
Tottenham Court Road he swung sharply round 
the corner to the right and collided with a lady 
walking in the opposite direction. He apologised 
energetically. The lady was plump, her hat 
spectacular, and her profession marked all over 
her in plain figures. But she evidently had an 
accommodating temper. 

“That’s oright, dearie,” she gasped; “you 
didn’t ’urt me. I ’ave difficulty with me bref,” 
she went on. “Walking too fast I was. Cold, 
ain’t it?” 

Gilbert felt surreptitiously in his pockets, and 
discovered that he still had a couple of Treasury 
notes and quite a lot of silver. Then he resumed 
the conversation. “Wish we could get a drink 
somewhere, don’t you?” he remarked. 

“Well, that’s just what I was thinking meself 
79 


80 


NOBODY KNOWS 


when we ran into each other. I’ve got a bottle 
of porty wine at my place. Feel you could fancy 
a drop? It’s good stuff, it reely is. Not public- 
’ouse port.” 

“Come on,” said Gilbert, elated. What a 
stroke of luck it was. A bad woman! The bad 
woman. 

“What’ll you give me, dearie?” his companion 
gasped. “It’s ’ard times, you know.” 

“I’ve a couple of pounds on me,” said Gilbert, 
“if that will pay for the port. It’s . . . all I 
wan’t you know.” 

The woman looked at him curiously. “Come 
on, then, old thing,” she said. 

Still puffing stertorously, she led the way to a 
dingy house in Tichfield Street, and inserted her 
key in the door. 

“Don’t make a noise, dearie, there’s a good 
soul,” she murmured huskily, when they stood in 
the evil-smelling hall. 

Gilbert struck a match, and by its light they 
climbed together to the “first-floor front.” 

“It’s a very respectable ’ouse, this,” explained 
his hostess, when the door had closed behind them. 

Gilbert was quite prepared to believe it. When 
the gas had risen gurgling into incandescence, he 
took a look round. On the round table in the 
middle of the room stood an ash-tray, a bottle of 
port and two glasses. The large bed, waiting in 
the corner with turned-down coverlet, looked clean 
and not uninviting. There was a gas stove, too, 


NOBODY KNOWS 


81 


and in front of it a couple of arm-chairs covered 
in rep which had once been wine-coloured, but was 
now a bilious brown. 

“My name’s Gertie,” panted the lady with 
ready tact. “ ’Aven’t we met before now? I seem 
to know yer face.” 

“Yes, I think we have,” Gilbert lied bravely. 
“At the Monico, probably, or down in Terry’s 
bar. Towards the end of the war. Let me have 
your card, Gertie. We must—er—meet again 
some time. Arrange it beforehand, you know. 
Go to an hotel somewhere. . . .” 

“Why, of course,” said Gertie rapturously 
producing from a drawer a rather frowsy pro¬ 
fessional card. “It’s queer how one runs into 
old friends. Lor’ love us, you did give me a 
bump!” 

Gertie lifted her skirt and petticoat, and laid 
bare a stretch of upper leg which she proceeded 
to rub. Her flesh had a sickly pallor; it looked 
edible but uninviting. Gilbert watched her, 
horrified and fascinated. After briskly massaging 
the bruised area, she removed her hat and coat, 
lit the gas-fire, and drew up the two arm-chairs. 
He sank into the comfortable expanse of the near¬ 
est one and lit a cigarette, while Gertie poured out 
two bumpers of port wine. 

The fire and the pot warmed him agreeably, 
and he had a foretaste and a pre-vision of the 
pleasures of middle-age. Slippered ease, peace 
by the fireside, a generous glass, and in the next 


82 


NOBODY KNOWS 


arm-chair a handsome, middle-aged woman, with 
maternal breasts enclosed chastely in white silk. 
It was very cosy, very cosy indeed. Perhaps it 
was the solution of all one’s troubles. Another 
ten years. . . . 

Gertie’s tact was beyond reproach. She did 
not seize her visitor with simulated passion, press 
herself against him and clamour to be kissed. 
She could do all that when necessary—foreigners 
in particular expected it—but she saw that what 
Gilbert wanted was just a drink and a companion. 
From his appearance she guessed him to be a 
“theatrical,” or else a clergyman in mufti. His 
black hair, pale face and dark liquid eye vaguely 
suggested the latter. In any case, she felt in no 
uneasiness about her present. Didn’t he want her 
to supply evidence? In a smart hotel, too. Just 
the job she liked. So she gave him his drink and 
waited for him to talk. She did not have to wait 
long. 

“ . . . what I mean is”—Gilbert was just 
getting into his stride—“we don’t any of us know 
precisely where we stand. We have discarded 
our pre-war stays of conventional morality, and 
we have also to a large extent discarded the will 
to live. You see my point, Gertie?” 

“Go on, dear; you do talk lovely,” said Gertie. 

“We need something to pull us together—a 
religion, a crusade. We are all numbed, and the 
consciousness that we are numbed drives us on 
remorsely to experiment and to sensation. We 


NOBODY KNOWS 


83 


haven’t an idea what is to grow out of this present 
chaos and confusion. Nobody knows. There’s 
no one to give any of us a lead. It is among 
highly educated boys and girls, the fathers and 
mothers of the next generation, that one can 
observe the maddened search for experience most 
clearly. Go to any woman’s college, and you’ll 
find all the girls busily exploring their sexual 
repressions. It’s quite dangerous to attend their 
dances. Cold, scientific, ego-centric, they hail a 
man as they might a taxi-cab! They jump in, 
arrive at their destination, jump out again. They 
think it means nothing to them. They have 
merely been rounding off their personalities, 
“satisfying the mysterious needs of the feminine 
nature”—and so forth, at some poor devil’s 
expense. It’s all in their text-books, in the vast 
pseudo-medical literature which they begin to 
explore the week after they’ve bobbed their hair. 
But it means a good deal more than they think. 
They have to pay in the end, poor kids. It’s sad 
to see all these children clanking the leaden fetters 
of free love! Poor dears. They’re pathetic. We 
are all of us pathetic. The fathers, mothers, aunts 
and uncles are just as pathetic as the boys and 
girls. To see the chaste and sexless Victorian 
spinsters struggling to emancipate themselves 
from their own remorseless virtue is a sight to 
rend one’s heart. And as for the men, the only 
happy ones to-day are those who wallow in the 
satisfaction of appetite to the exclusion of thought. 


84 


NOBODY KNOWS 


and those whose will to live is supplied by their 
insatiate greed.” 

Gilbert was thoroughly enjoying himself now. 
“The passion to acquire is almost the only passion 
left. And so we shall have more wars. A few 
years’ breathing-space, and it will all begin again, 
Gertie. Submarines, poison-gas, and the stench 
of rotting corpses infecting half the globe. . . 

Gertie, with trembling hand, replenished 
Gilbert’s glass. She was very frightened, and 
hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, 
but she thought him wonderful. He reminded 
her of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, whom she had 
once heard, years ago, in the City Temple. It 
Was beautiful to be able to talk like that, to talk 
and talk, and use such big, fine-sounding words. 

“No, we are all like sheep without a shepherd.” 
(Evidently by some strange telepathic process 
Gertie’s thoughts had communicated themselves 
to Gilbert’s brain. He was becoming increasingly 
like the Rev. R. J. Campbell.) “If the human 
race is to continue, another Moses must strike the 
rock, must descend to us from the mountain-top 
with the tables of the law. Once again the Word 
must be made flesh, the prophets stoned, and a 
Christ endure a second crucifixion. That’s what 
we are all waiting for, Gertie—some re-statement 
of the ancient truths. Not a new religion. There 
never has been a new religion. Christianity was 
not a new religion.” 

“That’s what he is,” thought Gertie. “A 


NOBODY KNOWS 85 

clergyman gone wrong. Turned out of his pulpit 
or something.” 

“There is essentially but one religion,” Gilbert 
continued, with growing fervour, “just as there 
is essentially but one Truth. It is the light of the 
Divine Truth, percolating by the faintest of rays 
into the darkness of the human mind, which alone 
inspires the race of man and saves it from 
ignominy. From these faint rays come all art, 
all beauty, all noble endeavour, all virtue, all 
morality. The rays may illuminate the befogged 
brain of the drunkard and the debauchee no less 
than the brain of the ascetic. And into the 
brilliant intellects of the great scientist, the world- 
famous professor, the highly-trained and deeply- 
read scholar they may fail to find any means of 
entry whatever, leaving their minds in deeper 
darkness than are the minds of many despised, 
humble and uneducated people.” The port was 
really not at all bad. He refreshed himself with 
a deep draught. “. . . Alas! since most of us, 
particularly those who have failed to escape the 
dangers of modern education, live in unrelieved 
darkness, so we accept and adopt the standards 
of value set by our distinguished teachers who live 
in a darkness similar to ours, and so also do we 
persecute, imprison and despise the illuminati 
whose standards differ from our own. You can 
only judge things, only test them by holding them 
up to the light. . . . Darkness, Gertie, propa¬ 
gates darkness. ...” 


86 


NOBODY KNOWS 


A snore, a little shy, well-mannered, subdued 
snore, crept in and twined itself about Gilbert’s 
discourse. It was followed by another, then a 
third, then a gentle procession of snores. In repose 
Gertie looked more than ever maternal. Her great 
bosom rose and fell gently beneath the white silk 
blouse; her hands rested upon her ample lap, and 
her expression was that of a nurse, infinitely kind, 
who has been looking after a tiresome child all 
day and is at last exhausted. 

Gilbert pulled himself together and laughed 
quietly. He searched in his pockets for his two 
pound notes and slipped them into one of Gertie’s 
plump white hands. He laid also three half- 
crowns by the bottle of port wine and tiptoed out 
of the room and down the stairs. He, too, was 
tired—tired, warm and emptied of all his dreams. 


CHAPTER X 


Gilbert did not, in point of fact, ever avail 
himself of the professional services of the amiable 
Gertie. The ex-landgirl, with her robust, common 
sense, definitely vetoed any such proceeding. 
“What utter nonsense,” she exclaimed, when 
Gilbert told her of his intention. “You and I 
have spent three jolly week-ends together at that 
hotel at Marlow. They know me perfectly well 
there, by sight. All you have to do is to tell your 
wife’s solicitors to go and search the register. My 
name won’t come into it, though I shouldn’t care if 
it did. But do keep things decent, Gilbert. Can’t 
you see the difference? You and I are normal 
healthy people who have had a normal and healthy 
experience together. We aren’t lovers now, but 
we are closer friends than we were before, and we 
have nothing to be ashamed of. But what you con¬ 
template doing is a sin against sex.” 

Gilbert was forced to admit Dorothy’s sin¬ 
cerity, though he could not share her lack of shame. 
He allowed himself to be persuaded, and the “evi¬ 
dence” was thus supplied. 

When at last the farce in Court was over, and 
the evening papers had printed their half-column 
exposures of his depravity, and the half-columns 
had been read by his friends, and forgotten by 
them, Gilbert experienced an indescribable sense 
87 


88 


NOBODY KNOWS 


of relief. No one could say that he had not done 
his best to give Chloe her chance of happiness. 

He had deserted Cleopatra’s roof for an attic 
flat in Great Ormond Street in Bloomsbury, and 
there he worked as he had never worked before. 
His principal diversions were long evenings with 
Tobey, during which they drank very cheap and 
very bad red wine and discussed Tobey’s new 
morality. Tobey invariably became intoxicated 
with his own enthusiasm. It was all so splendid, 
to be free to love rapturously, to cast off emotional 
restraint. All the world’s evils would disappear 
if women would free themselves, too! No more 
prostitution, no more stuffy marriages, no more 
disease and misery, no more pathological symp¬ 
toms, or unnatural vice. “Ooooh!” said Tobey, 
one night, hugging himself with pleasure, “the 
new generation is wonderful! However, I feel it 
my duty only to take on the difficult cases. I’ve 
got a frightfully hard job now.” He proceeded 
to detail, at great length, the “case history” of 
Betty Carson, his latest flame. “But I’ve made 
enormous progress,” he said. “I’ve got her to 
see things more clearly. In about a month’s time 
we’ll go to Italy together. Why don’t you come 
too, and bring Dorothy Dawson? Or is that 
over?” 

Gilbert shuddered. “I’m thankful, for poor 
Dorothy’s sake, that, in one sense, it never really 
began,” he said. “I haven’t quite your immoral 
courage, Tobey,” he went on. “It seems to me 


NOBODY KNOWS 


89 


that all this ‘rational thought’ about sex must 
lead to trouble. Sex is a mystery and it ought to 
be a sacrament. If this age destroys the monoga¬ 
mous ideal, what is going to take its place?” 

“The great thing is to destroy,” said Tobey. 
“Unless you destroy, the builders—whose job it 
is to do so—cannot build. Vm only a professional 
Heartbreak House-breaker. It is the business of 
the builders to put up something new and better on 
the sites prepared for them by our activities!” 

Happy Tobey! Six hundred a year, aunts in 
the peerage, and expectations. How easily things 
came to him! 

Gilbert, after six months among the good 
workers of Lord Corfe’s committee, had got back 
into a more congenial atmosphere, as literary 
adviser to a firm of publishers. He read innumer¬ 
able manuscripts, wrote introductory essays to 
classical reprints, reviews, “magazine page- 
articles,” anything and everything which he had 
a chance of selling. His income was enough now 
to keep him in greater comfort than he had known 
since the days before his marriage; and he could 
even afford to amuse himself by attempting to 
write plays and by experimenting with the short 
story. 

The hard work brought its own satisfaction, but 
it did not bring peace. Sometimes when he went 
for a lonely walk after dinner, round Mecklen- 
burgh Square, he found himself hankering after 
that curious dream-life which had occupied him 


90 


NOBODY KNOWS 


before his marriage debacle. Was it possible to 
recapture those thrills, to be liberated once more 
from the world of everyday and find again that 
unforgettable dream-figure, that dream-companion 
who had opened her arms to him and reproached 
him for his long tarrying? He tried to drug 
himself deliberately with dreams, as he had done 
in the old days. But it was no good. They would 
not come. He was saved now from the torture 
of seeing others suffer from his unsuccess. And 
he was earning enough to keep him in tolerable 
comfort. He wondered sometimes if it was neces¬ 
sary for him to endure the old agonies in order 
to recapture his lost compensations? His dream- 
drug now, in any case, seemed altogether out 
of his reach, and at present there was nothing in 
his life to take its place. A sense of loneliness 
invaded him despite the energy with which he 
worked, of loneliness and futility. 

Very often he went over in his mind, in retro¬ 
spect, that first occasion when he had experienced 
the mysterious thrill of passing over the border 
from the real world into the dream-world. The 
figure on the bridge still haunted him; and he 
could hear again, as clearly as if he had heard 
them but a moment earlier, her low soft laugh and 
the words which she had uttered. “When are 
you coming to me, Gilbert?” Where was she? 
Would he meet her in this world, or could he only 
find her by putting an end to an earthly existence 
which seemed to have no longer any attraction 


NOBODY KNOWS 


91 


for him or any purpose? Was the real message 
which she had sought to give him a warning that 
his quest for her, on earth, was a vain one and a 
promise that she would be waiting for him when 
he crossed the invisible frontier? 

Where these thoughts might have led him, had 
not Tobey intervened, he did not care, subse¬ 
quently, to speculate. Tobey, seeing that he was 
once again getting into a morbid condition of 
mind, insisted on dragging him away for a holiday 
to Dorsetshire. They stayed in a small inn, in a 
Purbeck village, bathed every day from a deserted 
beach, went for long walks over the downs, drank 
large quantities of Dorset beer, and slept like 
children. Nature asserted herself, and Gilbert 
soon recovered from his temptations to experience 
the thrill of self-destruction. After all, there were 
many lesser thrills still to be enjoyed. And 
Tobey’s infectious high spirits constituted in them¬ 
selves a pill to purge melancholy. 

Gilbert returned to London a changed being 
and threw himself with fresh energy into work 
which, for a man of his upbringing and experience, 
was full of interest. He was growing increasingly 
reconciled to a lonely existence when a chance 
glimpse of Moyra Burden—if indeed it was she— 
passing upon the top of an omnibus, re-opened an 
old sore. He debated the question as to whether 
he should write to her and suggest a meeting. 
Ten to one she would accept an invitation to 
dinner. But there was also the risk of a snub. 


92 NOBODY KNOWS 

He had been snubbed by her once. It rankled. 
He wondered whether it was the wound which she 
had given his vanity, at the time when he had 
sought consolation at her hands from Chloe’s dis¬ 
loyalty, which was the real secret of his continued 
interest in her. They had not been lovers, but 
they had at least been something more than 
friends—a tantalizing something more. As the 
weeks went by, he found himself thinking about 
her more frequently than he cared to acknowl¬ 
edge. When he did once refer to her in the 
course of a conversation with Tobey, that experi¬ 
enced philosopher only made the laconic reply: 
“Don’t be an idiot.” 


CHAPTER XI 


Miss Miriam Carmichael’s flat in Cheyne Walk 
had long been a headquarters of respectable uplift, 
of very patriotic demi-semi-pacifism and very safe 
philanthropy. She loved playing with move¬ 
ments; touching them gingerly at the end of a 
small subscription; going to their drawing-room 
meetings—provided, of course, that the meetings 
were held in the sort of houses to which one went, 
and that one met at them the kind of people one 
knew. She liked, above everything, to feel daring. 
Had she not gathered her friends together to 
listen to a Professor who had actually made some 
criticisms on the Treaty of Versailles? To be 
progressive like that was altogether in the note 
just now—like psycho-analysis. The real intelli¬ 
gentsia, the “interior” set, had quite given up 
being reactionary and Morning PosZ-ish. It was 
surprising how many of them took in The Daily 
Herald! 

Among Miss Carmichael’s progressive heroes 
Lord Corfe held a high place. Where he led, she 
usually followed. She was on his “special list.” 
With the “free literature” which invariably gushed 
forth from the committees over which he presided, 
it was his custom to send a personal letter begin¬ 
ning, “My dear Miss Carmichael.” The personal 
letter accompanying the leaflets about the Black- 
93 


94 


NOBODY KNOWS 


and-Tan activities in Ireland (which it had been 
part of Gilbert’s duties to have printed and distrib¬ 
uted) had been of such an unusually persuasive 
character that Miss Carmichael found herself 
stirred to action. Here was a matter which the 
leaders of the intellectual life of England, the high 
lights of literature and learning, must get together 
and discuss. Where could they do it better than in 
her drawing-room at Cheyne Walk? “I feel,” she 
said, over the teacups, to dear Mary Boyle-Martin, 
Lord Corfe’s eldest daughter, “that we writers 
really must do something about Ireland. I shall 
devote my Fridays .” 

And so the Fridays were devoted. The night 
for which Gilbert received his card was the super- 
Friday, the night of nights, last and greatest of 
the series. The card came to him correctly 
addressed to his flat in Great Ormond Street, and 
on the bottom of it was written in ink, “Do 
come! M.C.” It was some months since he had 
left the Irish Freedom Society and deserted the 
Jugo-Slavian Babies, and over a year since he had 
seen Miriam Carmichael, so that the arrival of the 
invitation piqued his curiosity. He wondered 
whether Chloe had seen her and introduced 
George; or whether she had heard rumours only 
of their separation, and wanted to pump him for 
details. In any case, he decided to go. 

When the evening came he dined with Tobey 
at his club and went on afterwards to Chelsea, 
arriving at Cheyne Walk at half-past nine. When 


NOBODY KNOWS 


95 


he entered the big drawing-room the Bishop was 
smiling benignly over a wide expanse of shirt- 
fronts and bare powdered necks. Miss Car¬ 
michael, a tall and imposing woman with white 
hair and straight black eyebrows, received him 
with an excited Ssh! and propelled him across the 
floor until he found a cushion at the Bishop’s feet. 
The Bishop had almost reached his peroration. 
There was silence while Gilbert subsided. Then 
somebody coughed impressively. The Bishop 
smiled at the floor, he smiled at the ceiling: and 
then he continued. “In conclusion,” he said, “I 
want you all to remember that the Irishman is a 
queer fellow. . .a very queer fellow. . .but 
he’s sound at heart. We must all. . .every one 
of us. . .in our several ways and in our several 
spheres... in accordance with our opportunities 
. . .do what little we can to help him build up 
the life of his country on sure foundations. And, 
above everything, when these troubles are over and 
done with, and the crimes which have been com¬ 
mitted by him in the heat of passion are but an 
evil memory, we — by showing him that we are 
ready to forgive — must help him to put away the 
past and to step forward into a bright future of 
happiness, prosperity and peace.” 

The Bishop ended in a warm glow which 
disseminated itself in waves throughout the room. 
Miss Carmichael’s eyes were glistening. The 
pretty bosoms of the young women, enclosed in 
the silk and lace of their becoming and expensive 


96 


NOBODY KNOWS 


frocks, were in a tumult of virginal emotion. In 
the pause which followed the Bishop’s pronounce¬ 
ment Gilbert looked round the room and smiled 
at his acquaintances. Then, glancing at his 
immediate neighbours, he saw, with a sudden 
thrill, that Moyra Burden was sitting quite close 
to him. A curious uncomfortable quiver ran 
down his spine. The blood rushed to his face, 
then left it paler than usual. He cursed himself 
for being so moved by the encounter. Moyra, 
meanwhile, watched him gravely. Then she 
smiled. “I wondered how long you were going 
to cut me!” she said. But they could not talk 
yet. Mr. Russell Rowton, the eminent literary 
critic, had risen from his chair. Mr. Rowton let 
drop an eyeglass before speaking. “I think,” 
he said, “that the Bishop’s noble words will find 
an echo in the hearts of every one in this room. I 
understand that a suggestion has been made that 
our thoughts and feelings should be made articu¬ 
late in a manifesto. I should like to propose, if I 
may, that we ask Mr. Fuddleston Brassery, whom 
we are all honoured to have among us this evening, 
to undertake the drafting of this manifesto, which 
should, in my view, be signed by not more than 
half a dozen of our most eminent men — and 
women — of letters. What I feel is that all the 
names, should, like that of Mr. Brassery, carry 
weight. ...” 

Mr. Brassery, whose twenty-five stone of flesh 
(but scarcely of blood) had been famous for so 


NOBODY KNOWS 


97 


long in London drawing-rooms, himself led the 
laughter, in which the Bishop joined with a 
Homeric peal. When Mr. Brassery’s own falsetto 
bray had subsided, one of the debutantes was 
heard to whisper, “Isn’t dear Mr. Brassery just too 
sweet about his fatness!” Mr. Rowton was thrown 
off his stroke by Mr. Brassery’s sense of humour. 
He inserted his eyeglass, tried to think of an 
epigram, failed, dropped his eyeglass, and grinned 
uncomfortably. 

Mr. Brassery, who now had the room with him, 
saved him from his quandary. He accepted the 
invitation to draft the manifesto. “Something 
quite short and moderate in its terms. No use 
going to extremes!” 

“Do you think Mr. Mortimer Blood would 
sign?” Miss Carmichael asked, in a shiver of' 
excitement. 

“Well,” said Mr. Brassery, “all that I know 
is that I met Mr. Blood this afternoon, and he told 
me that in regard to Ireland there were positively 
no lengths to which he would not go.” 

With Mr. Blood — the Northcliffe of poetry, 
the Napoleon of literary journalism — backing 
the movement, everyone felt that peace with Ire¬ 
land was assured. “He said he’d be here this eve¬ 
ning,” Miss Carmichael remarked rather plain¬ 
tively. And no sooner had she spoken than a step 
was heard upon the stairs. Full of regard for her 
grammar, she emitted an ecstatic “That’s he!” 
And he it was. For some moments he stood 


98 


NOBODY KNOWS 


framed impressively in the doorway, a red rose in 
the buttonhole of his dark tweed coat and a stray 
lock of white hair falling over one side of his 
glasses, like ivy festooned over a window-pane. 
Miss Carmichael, clasping the hand which she had 
just shaken, led him across to the best and largest 
cushion, while the room throbbed with the mag¬ 
netic waves of her excitement. 

With the arrival of Mr. Blood the party defi¬ 
nitely became a “meeting” and settled down to 
business. Miss Carmichael secured Mr. Blood’s 
consent to sign Mr. Brassery’s manifesto. (Mr. 
Brassery tittered, for some secret reason: Gilbert 
loved him for it.) “And Mr. Russell Rowton, 
too?” 

“But the manifesto will be nothing without the 
name of our distinguished hostess,” Mr. Rowton 
gallantly riposted. Miss Carmichael gave a quick, 
coy smile; then concealed her satisfaction by 
becoming business-like. “I think we ought to keep 
the list of signatories quite short,” she observed. 
“Half a dozen names, at the outside.” Mr. Blood 
nodded his assent. 

There came a pause, and now Miss Car¬ 
michael, as a good hostess, tactfully indicated that 
the obscurities and the semi-obscurities might “say 
something.” The complete obscurities butted in 
gaily, while the semi-obscurities and the almost 
well-known did their best to pull themselves 
together. 

After some moments of rather desultory talk, 


NOBODY KNOWS 


99 


Miss Carmichael made a diversion (which she 
ever afterwards regretted) by asking Moyra what 
she thought of it all, as an Irishwoman. So there 
was a “real” Irish girl there! Everyone looked 
up, beaming. How pretty she was too! The 
Bishop beamed, Mr. Russell Rowton beamed. 
Moyra’s personal vanity kindled at once her 
terrific racial swank. She felt a sudden desire 
just to show these half-baked Londoners, with 
their awful “kindness” and their hypercritical 
“moderation” (which was the outward sign of 
their hatred of clear thinking), precisely what they 
looked like to a pair of blue Irish eyes. 

The octopus got its tentacles into good working 
order and set them in motion, and Gilbert watched, 
with secret laughter, the deliberate deployment of 
charm. Moyra talked easily and well ; t and almost 
covered up the painful things she said by the 
agreeable manner in which she said them. The 
brogue and the wistful smile were also to the fore. 
She began by pointing out that most decent, intelli¬ 
gent, and really patriotic English people scarcely 
needed “conversion” at this time of day. A great 
many writers and artists had already protested, as 
far as they were able, when the Black-and-Tans 
burnt Balbriggan, ages ago. Hadn’t Mr. Vayle 
and his friends got out a manifesto which scores 
of people had signed? After all, the atrocities 
were becoming ancient history now. The Irish 
cause would not be helped by any sentimental 
outcry against them. One of the most hopeful 


100 


NOBODY KNOWS 


signs for Ireland was America’s attitude towards 
her debtors and the Daily Mail Anti-Waste cam¬ 
paign. The present Irish policy was an orgie of 
waste, and sooner or later the public would realise 
it, and then there would be a settlement. It was 
far better for well-meaning English people to leave 
passion for those who could feel it. . .and 
concentrate on the business side of the question 
. . .the wasted money, the disorganised trade, 
and the resulting unemployment. As to the moral 
aspects of the whole thing, after all, they couldn’t 
expect Irish people to keep the Englishman’s 
conscience. Of course, it was only natural that 
Christians and decent men in England should 
wish to dissociate themselves from their country’s 
“regrettable incidents,” and to issue manifestoes 
protesting their abhorence of them. But, after 
all, that was their lookout, wasn’t it? It didn’t 
affect Ireland or the Irish. 

Moyra turned her phrases prettily, and covered 
up her points with soft words and charming 
smiles, but they only pricked the deeper for that. 
Miss Carmichael grew crimson with irritation. 
To think that all this had been let loose on the 
defenceless head of Mr. Mortimer Blood, the 
editor of the Olympian Review, perhaps the most 
influential man of letters in the English-speaking 
world! It had been so difficult to arouse Mr. 
Blood’s interest in the Irish question. Miss Car¬ 
michael had worked so hard, and indeed if it had 
not been for the Bishop of Blandford’s help she 


NOBODY KNOWS 


101 


would not have succeeded at all. And now here 
was this wretched young woman from Dublin, up¬ 
setting eveything! That was the annoying thing 
about the Irish. They made things so impossible 
for those who were trying to help them. They 
refused to understand the generosity of the English 
character. With the Armenians (before their 
regrettable extermination) how different it had 
been! She thought of her Armenian Fridays, 
the excitement of the year before last. But one 
must not weary in well-doing. After all, the really 
nice Irish people, the sort one really knew, were 
never as intransigeante as this tiresome Burden 
girl. 

The conversation rippled on all round her, but 
respected Miss Carmichael’s absorption. She 
stood thinking about Mr. Yeats and dear Mr. 
Lennox Robinson, and the Abbey Theatre and 
Synge (that wonderful “Playboy”) and the 
Celtic Twilight, and the crooning voices of the 
colleens, and the bogs and mists and mountains, 
the “shillelaghs,” “jaunting-cars” and Paddies. 
They all blended in her mind, making a vague, 
emotional stirabout which restored her satisfac¬ 
tion. Oh, no! However dangerous and difficult it 
might be for a leader of literary society to take up 
Ireland at this juncture, it was certainly the right 
thing to do, the progressive thing. And how 
charming it was of Lord and Lady Corfe to invite 
her to their castle in Wicklow. Just fancy, a won¬ 
derful old tumble-down Irish castle, in the middle 


102 


NOBODY KNOWS 


of the mountains! It would be nice to go there — 
of course, when everything was settled down. And 
Mary Boyle-Martin had promised to take her one 
Sunday to see dear A. E., the poet-philosopher, 
who must be really too sweet, with his shaggy 
beard and his strong glasses and his pipe. . . . 

Miss Carmichael, tall, white-haired, elegant, 
with her fresh complexion and her coal-black eye¬ 
brows, was really a most impressive figure, and 
when she was silent and lost in a day-dream Gilbert 
found himself warming towards her. She was a 
good sort, really, despite her absurdity! 

It was some time before he could detach Moyra 
from the circle of admirers who had gathered 
round her. Good heavens, the girl had completely 
forgotten Ireland! She was in an ecstasy, talking 
literary gossip to the big names, rallying old 
Fuddleston about his latest book. At last, how¬ 
ever, she turned to him, and he suggested that 
they should share a taxi back to Bloomsbury. It 
was getting late. Several people had already 
made their adieux. Miss Carmichael, as Gilbert 
passed in Moyra’s wake, gave him a meaning, 
sentimental handshake. 


CHAPTER XII 


A constraint fell upon them when they 
emerged into the night and walked along by the 
riverside towards the cab-rank. A hot golden 
moon made a pathway of light down the stream, 
and the leaves of the trees on the Embankment 
murmured in the tense, restless dark. For a 
moment, before hailing their taxi, they leant to¬ 
gether over the stone parapet and looked down at 
the water that was alive, and secret, and purpose¬ 
ful, and mysterious, and menacing. Neither 
spoke, but Gilbert was conscious of Moyra’s 
steady and unwavering glance. The prominent, 
grave blue eyes were fixed upon him, taking him 
in, appraising him. “You’ve changed, Gilbert,” 
she said at last, as they moved away. 

In the cab, on their way home, they talked at 
first on ordinary topics — on books and pictures 
and places — and underneath their casual surface 
conversation was another, not spoken in words. 
Gilbert was conscious that on Moyra’s side their 
friendship was not dead, and this consciousness 
soothed and comforted. He had been clumsy and 
over-emotional; and she had shrunk from him 
because she couldn’t help it. He had frightened 
her, perhaps because she was not really as indif¬ 
ferent as she had pretended to be, nor he the mere 
philanderer. What a peculiar and subtle instru- 
103 


104 


NOBODY KNOWS 


ment was the body, the body of woman even more 
than that of man! It exercised its influence in 
every kind of friendship, including the most 
platonic, in ways hard to discover, so cleverly did 
the conscious mind conceal them. A man usually 
thought only of one kind of physical expression 
for his emotion: the ultimate expression, the con¬ 
summation. That attitude was too crude for the 
modern world; too crude, at all events, for the 
modern woman. 

“And Chloe?” he asked, after a pause. 

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen her,” Moyra replied. 
“She’s changed even more than you have, 
Gilbert. Changed for the better, too. She’s, 
somehow, more herself. I don’t know that she’s 
any happier; but she certainly feels safer. They 
are in George’s old flat in Westminister, you 
know.” 

“Then you think that to live with me means to 
live dangerously?” Gilbert asked. 

Moyra nodded, and laughed. “That is the 
secret of your attraction, perhaps, for one kind of 
woman. Not for Chloe, though. You didn’t 
hold her firmly enough; and she had no strength of 
her own to give you back, in return for the energy 
she took out of you. You ought to marry your 
grandmother, Gilbert. You’ll never be happy 
with a woman till you find one foolish enough, and 
fond enough, to give you all the things you need, 
and go on giving them.” 

“Aren’t you the wise one!” exclaimed Gilbert. 


NOBODY KNOWS 105 

“And where have you learnt all this worldly 
wisdom from?” 

“From the world,” Moyra replied. “I’ve 
seen a great deal more of your nasty London since 
we met last.” 

“Well, nasty London, at first hand, is better 
than any of your paradis artificiels that you used 
to find in the poems of your literary heroes. 
You’ve changed too, you know, Moyra.” 

“Coarsened, I expect.” 

“Enough to live and flourish in the fresh air, 
instead of in the hothouse? Well, I hope so. I 
doubt it.” 

“I don’t think we really know a great deal 
about one another,” said Moyra. “I’m sure now 
that I don’t know very much about myself. I only 
know one thing. When I told you you would 
find me a disappointment, it was true. I’ve 
nothing to give, my dear — that you want.” 

“The point to me is, is there a chance that you 
would ever want to give it, if you had it to give? 
The intention, in the Catholic sense, is all impor¬ 
tant, Moyra.” 

Moyra looked out of the window of the cab at 
the blank faces of the houses which swept past 
them, a long gauntlet of inquisitive eyes. 

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t 
believe I could ever give up my work. You don’t 
understand what it means to me, Gilbert, and I 
don’t suppose you ever will. Men are different 
in that way. They don’t throw themselves into 


106 


NOBODY KNOWS 


their jobs as women do — nor for that matter, into 
their love affairs. Men leave the back door open 
despite all their tears. But women can’t escape so 
easily. ...” 

The cab drew up with a scrunch before 
Moyra’s flat. She kissed him good-bye; it was a 
renewal of their friendship. Was it friendship? 
Gilbert watched her let herself into the dark hall of 
her house with a curious mixture of emotions. 
Why was it that his type of man should be doomed 
forever to pursue the elusive and the unattainable, 
in life as well as in art? Moyra, the never-to-be- 
possessed, could hold him as a girl like Dorothy, 
with all her courage, her youth, her clean and 
frank acceptance of physical union, could never 
hold him. And with Dorothy he could have ease, 
and comfort, and a home, and cheerfulness, and 
children. And with Moyra would come — what? 
Only frustration and agony, most likely. He was 
a fool for his pains — a fool: and he knew it. 

He dismissed the taxi and walked on through 
the warm night towards his flat. Murmurs came 
from the mysterious houses, and he looked spec¬ 
ulatively at the dark and at the lighted windows. 
What was happening behind all those drab 
facades, what dreams charmed or disturbed the 
sleepers, what hopes and fears haunted those 
who lay awake, what vows were being exchanged 
between happy lovers, what bitter words were 
rising to the lips of those whose love was dead? 
As he walked slowly through the empty streets 


NOBODY KNOWS 


107 


there came to him an overwhelming emotion of 
sympathy, of kinship with his fellow-men. It was 
something bigger than family feeling and acknowl¬ 
edgment, in the conventional sense, of the tie of 
kindred. In his sensitised condition he felt united 
with all humanity, clean of every hatred, fulfilled 
with love. In all those dark or darkly glowing 
houses were men and women, tormented with 
desires, grappling with all the normal and the 
abnormal human appetites, loving, hoping, 
suffering, and struggling — all of them — towards 
some goal, indefinable and indistinct, and never-to- 
be-reached. All, at the bottom of their hearts, 
were like children, puzzled by things they could 
not understand, haunted by the swift shadows of 
the Great Reality which never may be understood. 
And to escape from the terror of these shadows 
they played — to divert their minds, to secure a 
measure of ease and forgetfulness — with riches 
and poverty and business and pleasure and poli¬ 
tics and passions, with hatreds and with loves, 
with wars and revolutions, played with them until 
the last and deepest shadow fell across their paths 
and they could play no more. 


CHAPTER XIII 


“Every day in every way I grow better and 
better and better.” Cleopatra’s lips drooped, her 
head fell back against the rim of her canopied 
garden-chair, and she looked dejectedly at the ger¬ 
aniums in the flower-bed in front of her. She 
didn’t feel in the least bit better. The brass- 
beaded rosary dropped from her plump hand on 
to the grass, coiling itself snake-like on the cool 
earth. It was no good; however much “better” she 
might become in every way, she’d never become 
as placid as a geranium, as hard as a brass bead. 
And that was just what, after her muddled fashion, 
she wanted to become — quite, quite placid and 
beautiful and hard. These bits of girls and boys 
who came to Belsize Towers didn’t understand 
what it was like to feel things. The boys, partic¬ 
ularly, hadn’t any feelings. What they called 
love! Why, it was just like their dinners. They 
none of them understood a woman’s heart. Poor 
Prudence. Poor dear Prudence. Poor dear, dear 
Prudence! Tears of compassion began to trickle 
down Cleopatra’s large lined face. They ran down 
the wrinkled neck; they endangered the purple 
silk jumper; she couldn’t find her hankie any¬ 
where. She hunted for it. Her vast bulk began to 
grow agitated and she sniffed vigorously in her 
distress. She meant well. She knew she meant 
108 


NOBODY KNOWS 


109 


well. But somehow she wasn’t clever enough to do 
well. It didn’t come out right! Oh dear! oh dear! 
Her eye fell on the brass beads sacred to the Coue 
system. She clutched them, together with a 
handful of grass, closed her eyes and with the 
convulsive fervour of a devotee began once more: 
“Every day, in every way I grow better and better 
and better and better.” 

“Nonsense, Cleopatra, you’re quite perfect as 
you are. You’ve got an inferiority complex, that’s 
all that is the matter with you.” 

It was that wicked Tobey. He stood looking 
down at her with affectionate amusement. He 
didn’t seem to know how wicked he was. 

“It isn’t right, Tobey, the way you’ve treated 
Prudence,” sniffed Cleopatra, in great agitation. 
“She’s eating her heart out, and you aren’t worth 
it.” 

“Of course I’m not,” said Tobey. “That’s 
why the way I treated her was the right way. 
Otherwise she’d never be eating me out of her 
heart. She’d never get over me. Now she will. 
And she’ll be all the better. They always are 
better, Cleopatra. I’m a good worker, after my 
own system, if you only understood it.” 

Cleopatra looked at him, open-mouthed, with 
knitted forehead. If only her poor old brain 
would function when she wanted it to! She 
knew she had a reply somewhere, a devastating 
reply. 

“When I was a girl ...” she began. 


110 


NOBODY KNOWS 


“Quite,” said Tobey, good naturedly. “But 
you see we are busy changing all that.” 

“Don’t believe it,” Cleopatra snapped. 

“Oh, but we are.” 

“Don’t tell me. You can’t.” 

“We can.” 

“Look at Prudence, then. She’s your wife, 
but you aren’t her husband. It means everything 
to a chit of a child like that — the first man. 
And you just laugh. Oh, I hate you, Tobey, I 
hate you! The only love you understand is self- 
love.” 

“Reasoned egoism is a nicer name for it, 
dear,” Tobey replied, in his most luscious voice. 
“It’s a very wonderful quality. Makes me irre¬ 
sistible. What woman is there who can stand an 
unselfish man who is devoted to her? Why, it 
takes the ginger out of life for them. They prefer 
the egoist every time. A conflict of egoisms leads 
to trouble, of course. But mating of egoisms, even 
a temporary one, is sublime. Besides, it allows 
both parties to preserve their self-respect.” 

“But what about Prudence?” 

“Dear Prudence! What about her? Is she 
in? I thought of going to the theatre with her 
to-night. I might even pay for her, if it’s a 
gallery, deeply against my principles as it is to 
do anything of the kind.” 

“A gentleman always paid everything when I 
was a girl, as a matter of course.” 

“And got it all back when he married, and the 


NOBODY KNOWS 


111 


girl’s soul and body into the bargain! Bad, Cleo¬ 
patra; very bad. That’s another thing we’ve 
changed. We are human beings first now, and 
sexual animals afterwards. Girls have to learn to 
pay their way honestly with their own money, not 
with kisses and cajolery.” 

Tobey sat on the grass, laid his honey-coloured 
head on Cleopatra’s knees, and gazed tranquilly at 
the blue sky. Cleopatra wanted to let her fingers 
stray through his curly hair. He was a very 
naughty boy. But she couldn’t be angry with 
him. And he had so many explanations for every¬ 
thing he did which made them seem right. It was 
her instinct only which made her certain he was 
wrong. 

Prudence now came shuffling into the garden 
like a gawky schoolgirl, her bare feet stuffed into 
house-slippers. When she saw Tobey her face lit 
up and she grinned a boyish grin. 

“Hullo,” she said, stuffing her hands in the 
pockets of her skirt. She sat down at Cleopatra’s 
feet and leaned, like Tobey, her head against those 
large maternal knees. 

“My poor dear children!” gasped Cleopatra, 
in a flurry of maternal emotion. 

But Tobey counted among his principal virtues 
an entire absence of sentimentality; and he had no 
intentions of indulging in any heart-to-heart talk, 
with Cleopatra as mother-confessor. He disre¬ 
garded her tears and sighs and plunged at once 
into an animated conversation about Gilbert. 


112 


NOBODY KNOWS 


“Prudence, I’ve got a job for you,” he said. 

Prudence smiled and gurgled with pleasure. 
“I hope it isn’t any more socks,” she replied. 
“I’m tired of your socks, Tobey. If you weren’t so 
stingy you’d buy some new pairs.” 

“It isn’t socks, it’s my unfortunate friend 
Gilbert. Cleopatra, if we don’t all take care that 
young man will be entangled a second time in all 
the horrors of matrimony. I see it coming on. I 
know the type to which his Moyra belongs. 
Repressed and over-educated Irish middle-class 
school-marm. They pretend there isn’t an Irish 
middle-class but, my God, it’s the worst in the 
world. Dublin is worse than Surbiton, more full 
of tuppenny-farthing cliques, and sets, and con¬ 
gregations than — Watford. And Gilbert is on the 
brink, hovering on the very verge. He must be 
saved. He’s too good to waste. Prudence must 
take the matter in hand, exert a good influence on 
him.” 

“You are an idiot, Tobey, at times,” said 
Prudence, tossing her curly, bobbed brown head. 
“What have I got to do with it? Gilbert and I 
are very good friends. I love him because he’s 
sentimental and old fashioned, like I am.” 

“Prudence!” Tobey turned to her a horror- 
stricken face. 

“Quite right, dearie,” sighed Cleopatra. “It’s 
a mercy you’ve the pluck to own it.” 

“Well, it’s true,” said Prudence, “and I can’t 
help it. I wish I could, now. Gilbert’s the same 


NOBODY KNOWS 


113 


as me, really. If you want to throw a siren across 
his path, why don’t you try Iseult? At least she’s 
lovely, with her mop of red hair and her bright 
eyes and her long legs. But why you can’t leave 
Gilbert alone I can’t imagine. I’ve seen Moyra, 
and I should think they get along awfully well. I 
hope they do marry, so there!” 

“And after all my educational efforts, 
Prudence. It’s too disheartening!” 

“I’ve a good mind to close the house and send 
you all away,” said Cleopatra, with sudden 
vehemence. “You sicken me, that’s what you 
do. If you don’t give up this young person you 
say you’re going to Italy with, and come back 
here and do the decent by Prudence, I’m through 
with you, Tobey, and that’s all about it. You’ve 
done nothing but harm these last two years, and 
God help me, through listening to your nonsense 
and swallowing it for gospel I’ve bin as bad. I 
ought to have spent me money on ’orspitals or 
saving the starving German and Austrian children 
— on anything rather than on running this house 
for the likes of you. I don’t hold with a wife being 
too strait-laced with her husband, provided he’s 
kind to her and keeps the home going. Let him 
have his fling, the dirty dog, if he must have it, 
and provided he doesn’t advertise it in everybody’s 
face. The same with the wife. If the husband 
can’t make her happy, then he ought to let some¬ 
one else do it, provided she is loyal to the home 
and doesn’t make a fool of him. But barring any 


114 


NOBODY KNOWS 


real reason for splitting apart, what I say is one 
wife, one husband, one home, one family. If a 
couple can’t be faithful to each other’s bodies, and 
sometimes it’s a job, I admit, what I say is, let 
them be faithful and loyal to the home and the 
family. A little bit of unhappiness don’t do 
nobody no harm. And it’s worth it in the end. 
What are you saving up for yourself, Tobey, I 
should like to know? Ten years of gout in a club 
arm-chair, most likely.” 

“Cleopatra, you’re a renegade,” Tobey sighed. 
“You are going back on us all.” 

“Well, I’m tired of helping you to your 
own damnation,” said Cleopatra. “If there 
was any real love in you, I wouldn’t mind it. 
But don’t tell me. I know what love is — you 
don’t.” 

“So you said before,” Tobey replied. “But it 
doesn’t make it true.” 

Cleopatra relapsed into an outraged silence, 
and clutched furiously at her brass beads. 
Presently she felt a touch upon her hand. It was 
Prudence. The girl dragged the strong, pathetic 
hand, with its gnarled finger-joints and square, 
flat nails, down to her lips and kissed it, while 
Tobey, bored and disappointed, strolled off to play 
Scriabine in the music-room. He wanted to get 
away to the Yorkshire moors, to throw back his 
hatless head — and laugh. The older he grew 
the more convinced he was that the two most 
important things in life are food and sex. Human- 


NOBODY KNOWS 


115 


ity’s essential sacraments: our daily bread. As 
his fingers touched the keyboard, he realised that 
the life of the schoolmaster is far from enviable. 
No wonder he gets long holidays. He needs them! 


CHAPTER XIV 


After the renewal of their friendship at 
Miriam Carmichael’s party Gilbert and Moyra 
met frequently. They went to picture galleries, 
and to theatres, dined together two or three nights 
a week, lent one another books — in short, took up 
their acquaintance at the point where it had been 
broken off and developed it until it became the 
most important thing in both their lives. Gilbert, 
hungry for affection yet at the same time dis¬ 
illusioned, would hardly have been human if the 
friendship had not, on his side, developed into 
something which he mistook for love. And 
Moyra, without consciously doing so, employed 
upon him all the arts of the coquette. Her easy, 
passionless kisses were his for the asking. She 
made professions of being “outside conventional 
morality”; and she was no prude. But she 
never pretended to any real warmth of feeling, 
and to Gilbert, who watched her closely, it was 
clear enough that there was something lacking in 
her. But his hopes and desires constantly defeated 
his judgment. He told himself that in time the 
capacity to love would come to her; that when it 
came her egoism and the small meannesses and 
cruelties which went with it would disappear and 
be forgotten. Love would warm her whole nature, 
give her generosity of thought and deed. Several 
116 


NOBODY KNOWS 


117 


times he asked her to go away with him, but she 
refused — not because she objected on principle to 
doing so, but merely because the limitations of 
Gilbert’s purse made it impossible for him to 
suggest a tour which seemed sufficiently attractive. 
At last the success of a sentimental love story put 
him in funds, and he was able to propose an 
autumn journey to Paris and to Florence, during 
her vacation. She accepted this with evident 
pleasure, and the date was fixed for their 
departure. 

At half-past nine in the morning, on the day 
when they had arranged to start on the momentous 
journey, Gilbert was rubbing his soaped chin with 
the shaving brush and wondering what on earth 
was in store for them. He looked at himself in 
the glass; he looked at his watch. There was 
still an hour and a half before the train went. So 
they were actually going away together. Another 
experiment! His heart sank with despondency 
as he thought of it. Moyra, with all her charm 
and beauty, was really the type of girl who ought 
to go either to a psycho-analyst or to a nunnery. 
His brain told him this much, and the more clearly 
it warned him the more ardently did his hopes give 
him the lie. Love would come to her, nature 
would see him through, the blue Italian skies 
would smile on them and save them and give them 
happiness. No more entanglements this time. 
Moyra hated the idea of marriage and didn’t want 
children. They would be free. They would put 


118 


NOBODY KNOWS 


the new theories of Tobey and his friends to the 
test, and make a beautiful relationship which 
would enable him to forget the past. And all the 
time his brain said “Fool!” 

Another experiment, Mr. Gilbert Vayle! 
Haven’t you had enough of them? You’ve been a 
hubby in a little flat. It would have been a con¬ 
ventional middle-class marriage of the vaguely 
“art” type if you’d had a little job and a steady 
little income — so you may be said to have exper¬ 
ienced that . You made a mess of it. Then you’ve 
lived in Cleopatra’s menagerie and watched the 
younger generation experimenting in what, poor 
darlings, they call free love. You’ve had a spell 
of philandering yourself — till you found it de¬ 
grading. (Aren’t you ever satisfied?) You’ve 
worked with the good workers, for the Jugo¬ 
slavian Babies; and with the political idealists 
for Irish self-determination; you’ve re-inspected 
the social altitudes of literary London; and now 
you’ve gone back to your old groove — an office: 
catching the tube at half-past nine every morning 
and at half-past five every afternoon. Well, 
you’ve had a good sniff at the muddle and chaos in 
which we are living, and you’ve been thoroughly 
muddled and chaotic yourself. Tell us, what the 
hell do you make of it all? Do you like “prog¬ 
ress” with all its mistakes, its absurdities, its 
incidental casualties and its splendid faith? Or 
do you, at the bottom of your heart, believe in 
safety and tradition and inherited instinct and the 


NOBODY KNOWS 


119 


conventions a la Maynard Brown? Are you a 
sentimentalist, covering up the gratification of 
appetite with garments of emotion; or a realist and 
a connoisseur of physical pleasure; or an idealist, 
trying to transform, to sublimate, to repress and 
to preserve? And \vhat about this Moyra? Do 
you love her, or are you merely exasperated by 
her. Do you honestly believe that you and she 
can ever mate? With all your experience, with 
all your knowledge of the physique de Vamour , 
have you really any hope of being able to play 
Pygmalion to Moyra’s Galatea? 

The cold sponge, vigorously applied, cooled 
a little Gilbert’s sizzling brain. He seized his 
collar and tie, and began to put them on. 

Well, anyway, for her sake as well as for his 
own, he would have to try. The Platonic relation 
might be all very well for the jaded debauchee. 
But for vigorous and healthy people — it was 
absurd, an affront to the Creator. Moyra’s pecu¬ 
liarities were not virtues to be imitated, but 
diseases to be cured. Would he be able to cure 
them? Probably not. And yet they had their 
friendship: and it was valuable. . . . 

Come, Mr. Gilbert Vayle. Love lightly! No 
surrender, sir. The nature of the creative man is 
many-sided. It has room for everything — work, 
friendship, amourettes, ideal passions. Let every¬ 
thing be accepted and enjoyed — the ego in 
command. Lend, but don’t give. Keep your 
end up, mon ami, you are too old for this folly. 


120 


NOBODY KNOWS 


You are starting on a fool’s errand. The only 
thing you can’t get fineness out of is refinement. 
Tobey is right. Refinement is a disease. Is the 
sea refined, or the sunlight, or the hot earth full 
of corruption bursting into flower? Give us a 
stiff glass of pornography: there’s truth, at least, 
in its dregs. A touch of reality! Silly ass, even 
to dream of trying to alter your nature to suit hers. 
Nature getting at you, to enable you to breed. 
That’s all Nature cares about. If you fail with 
her, you fail. She’s not for you. You’ve made 
another mistake. Well, what about it? The 
world won’t stop, the blue Italian sky won’t 
darken, it won’t interfere with the march of the 
seasons nor bring you one step nearer to the 
waiting grave. “The grave’s a fine and private 
place!” Marvell, like the genius he was, had 
the sense to pour his little torments on to paper. 
Canalised energy. The artist is bi-sexual: father 
and mother. He engenders, and after shaping 
and moulding his work in the womb of his mind, 
with agony he brings forth. Art battens upon 
thwarted passion. Fools say that artists lead 
miserable lives. What nonsense! Sterility — 
that’s our only real unhappiness. We can’t have 
any others worth writing home about. The conven¬ 
tional disaster for us, is just a natural pain 
like the pains of labour. That’s better, then. 
Now you’ve cleared it up, a bit. Live alone and 
die alone. We all have to. Our Father, which 
art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. 


NOBODY KNOWS 


121 


Gad, it’s a quarter past ten. We’ll miss the 
train. And after all these months! What an 
anti-climax. 

Vayle rushed into the bathroom, cleaned the 
razor and stuffed it into his sponge-bag; twisted 
the sponge up in his towel and put his foot upon 
it to squeeze out the water; threw in tooth-brush, 
nail-brush; collected tubes and bottles and nail 
scissors and spare studs and packed them as best 
he could in the already bulging suit-case. He 
took a last look round the flat in the hope of finding 
some of the many things which he knew he must 
have forgotten, then hurried out into the street. 
By good fortune he stopped a taxi-cab just outside 
the door. “Victoria,” he gasped. “Continental 
station.” 

Moyra was waiting for him by the bookstall, 
where they had agreed to meet. She had been 
waiting some time, but was not the one to show 
impatience. “Well I thought you’d thrown me 
over,” she said, smiling at him and blushing 
slightly. The little devil. The coquette. The 
colder a woman is, the more she delights in rousing 
a man and the more cunningly she does it. Sex 
at second-hand: they can’t dodge it altogether, 
can’t turn off all the taps, unless they’re withered, 
sapless creatures. High percentage, though, of 
incomplete women in the British Isles. Ten per 
cent? 

“Look at here,” said Moyra, pointing to the 
bookstall. “Aren’t you the great man?” There 


122 


NOBODY KNOWS 


was the immortal work, by the dozen, in a glaring 
wrapper. A long line of it, just out in “cheaps.” 
“The Silent Stranger,” by Gilbert Vayle. 

“Love and tears,” said Vayle, with a laugh. 
“Sob-stuff. Broken-hearts all seccotined in the 
last chapter. Sentiment laid on with a trowel! 
Their hearts begin to palpitate in Chapter One. 
Palpitations increase steadily throughout the book. 
Thank God, you haven’t read it, my dear. 
But I got ten thousand dollars for the film rights 
of the damn thing. Never made so much money 
before in my life, at one go.” 

“Well, you ought to invest it sensibly,” said 
Moyra, “instead of wasting money on pullmans.” 

“Nonsense. Avanti Savoia! We’ll go to 
Venice and buy a palace with it, if the exchange 
allows it.” 

The porter took their luggage and they 
esconced themselves in their green arm-chairs. A 
vague aroma of stockbroker and leading lady, off 
to “Paree” for an illicit honeymoon, pervaded the 
wagon-salon. Examples of the type strolled in 
and settled themselves among their plutocratic 
baggage. The ladies opened little bags and 
dabbed themselves mysteriously. They took out 
tiny handkerchiefs and put them back again. 
They made eyes and moues at their men, while the 
men sucked their cigars amorously, and ruminated 
as to whether they should lunch on the train or 
on the boat. 

Moyra had never travelled before, save from 


NOBODY KNOWS 


123 


Ireland. She was in a flutter of excitement, un¬ 
becoming a lecturer on Literature at the Gurney 
College for Women. She forgot to wonder how 
much or how little she cared for Gilbert. This 
was her own experience, all her own. He couldn’t 
share it, bless his heart. He was thinking of her: 
but she was dreaming of Paris. Paris at last. 
Shades of Baudelaire and of Verlaine; the 
Quartier Latin, poets, painters, Bohemians, the 
Boul’ Mich,’ the trees in the Luxembourg Gar¬ 
dens, the Louvre! All the bag of tricks! Her 
prominent blue eyes glittered and her heart beat 
rapidly as the train ran through pleasant, undis¬ 
tinguished Kent. She looked blankly at the tame 
English country-side, but didn’t see it. But 
Gilbert kept his eyes glued to the window and felt 
his heart torn with a curious tenderness for his 
own country. It was so unpretentious, so prettily 
up and down, so appealing. The oast houses 
stood up two and two, like giant Brownies’ caps; 
the old red farmhouses squatted down among the 
barns and the stables and the cowsheds with 
maternal placidity, watching year after year the 
mysteries of birth and death, of sowing and of 
harvesting. The trees, in their autumn loveliness 
of gold and brown, sent through his mind an 
orgasmic thrill of pleasure. Beautiful as London 
was, it had not this inhuman beauty. Even the 
trees in its parks and gardens were tamed and 
humanised, held prisoners in a surrounding sea 
of humans. But here the trees were still free, they 


124 


NOBODY KNOWS 


lived their own lives among their peers, could talk 
to one another in their own language, with none 
to overhear. 

The train ran through Folkestone, then along 
by the stone-coloured sea. Dover Town. The 
leading ladies and the stockbrokers stopped eyeing 
one another like prize-fighters in the ring and 
began to collect respectively their fur-coats and 
their vanity-bags. The ladies opened their little 
bags and closed them again; took out tiny squares 
of silk and put them back; opened pocket-glasses, 
dabbed, patted and smiled. The train ran on to 
the pier, slowed down, stopped. The porters 
swarmed and shouted. First stage over. Paris 
in six hours now! 

Moyra was a good sailor. They lunched on 
board heartily, the sea air giving an edge to their 
appetites. Gilbert drank double-whiskies ritual- 
istically, as a specific against mal de mer . He 
had always drunk whisky on Channel packets, 
since his schooldays. It was one of the recognized 
dissipations of travel. 

Soon the chalk cliffs faded, and the familiar 
white lighthouse at Calais and the big station 
building loomed through the greyness of the 
October afternoon. The engine-room bell went 
“ping-ping.” The packet slowed up; the pas¬ 
sengers surged towards the gangway; the blue- 
overalled porters crowded upon the quay, pointed 
to the brass numbers on their bosoms and made 
frantic gestures of invitation. Gilbert caught the 


NOBODY KNOWS 125 

eye of Quarante-neuf; and in another few minutes 
they were off the ship, on foreign soil. 

It was a delight to see Moyra so happy. She 
sat very close to him in the train, linked her arm 
in his, and became as excited as a child. She 
seemed suddenly to yield herself to him, and he 
refused to spoil his own happiness by attributing 
it to the fact that he was giving her a “treat.” 
Cynicism and middle-age went hand-in-hand, and 
surely he had some youth left? 

They did not talk much in the train: both were 
happy in their different ways. To Moyra the 
flying landscape was a continuous excitement, to 
Gilbert a perpetual reminder. And the thin arm 
linked in his seemed to warm his whole being: 
the dead heart seemed to come to life again with 
a vengeance. “The grass that has oftentimes been 
trodden underfoot, give it time, it will rise up 
again!” Perhaps when one ceases to be able to 
love, one is already dead. Well, the funeral was 
postponed, at all events. . . . 

The surge and flurry of the Gare du Nord — 
Gallic dramatisation of the commonplace. Escape 
at last into the twilit streets in the wake of the 
porter. Isolation in the jimcrack, rickety cab. 
Paris. . . . 

Moyra sat breathless, holding her lover’s arm. 

Knowing Moyra’s tastes, Gilbert had taken 
rooms in a small hotel on the left bank, in the rue 
des Beaux-arts. A dressing-room, with a bed in 
it, opened out of the larger room. They were 


126 


NOBODY KNOWS 


received by the smiling patronne as “Monsieur 
et Madame.” The valet de chambre preceded 
them up the winding staircase to the second floor, 
deposited their baggage and departed, with a 
smile, closing the door. 

Their first embrace, to Gilbert, was unnerving, 
terrible. He was afraid, stricken with fear. But 
Moyra’s eyes shone with a child’s ruthless happi¬ 
ness. She was in uncontrollable high spirits. 
His love for her was strong enough to prevent 
him from disturbing her. She had not questioned 
the arrangement of the rooms; she had not resisted 
when he had put the wedding-ring on her finger 
“to save trouble”; she had no place now in her 
mind for complications or decisions. Gilbert said 
to himself that they must dine, and look up friends, 
afterwards, in the familiar cafes, and get very 
tired and sleepy. Let things be. Let the gods 
decide. There was time. 


CHAPTER XV 


“Chloe!” 

“Moyra!” 

The two women looked at one another, for 
some moments, in a thrilling silence. Then Chloe 
got up from her chair and moved across to Moyra’s 
table. It was a quarter to twelve. Gilbert was in 
the.hotel, writing, and Moyra was waiting in the 
cafe of their adoption until he came to take her 
to luncheon. She had bought the last number of 
UEsprit Nouveau at Flammarion’s, and had spent 
a blissful half-hour turning its pages, sipping her 
vermouth-citron, watching the passers-by. This 
unexpected encounter with Chloe woke her from a 
pleasant dream. 

They plied one another with conventional 
questions: 

“How long have you been here? How long 
are you staying?” 

“We are leaving for Florence in a few days,” 
Moyra observed. “We shall be in Italy about 
a month.” She flushed slightly as she faced 
Chloe’s glance. Out of the corner of her eye she 
saw the large outline of George Maynard Brown, 
sitting with a cigar in his mouth before the Con¬ 
tinental Daily Mail. The British husband. Ugh! 

127 


128 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Chloe’s eye fell upon her wedding ring. “My 
darling girl,” she exclaimed rapturously. “A 
honeymoon! I am so glad. Who is he? Do I 
know him?” 

Moyra flushed more deeply. 

“It isn’t a honeymoon, Chloe,” she said. “At 
least, not in the conventional sense. You know 
it’s quite possible for a man and a woman who 
are friends to travel together . . . without all 
that.” 

Chloe gurgled with laughter at what she con¬ 
sidered her friend’s naivete . She regarded Moyra 
as a grown-up person regards a child who has 
made a comic remark with great seriousness. 
Moyra, on her side, resented this condescension. 
She was in arms for her virginity; the virgin 
defiant. Chloe, she thought, was just one of these 
commonplace, sensual married women, all dulled 
and smeared with sex and maternity and domes¬ 
ticity. A cow. 

“But you haven’t told me who it is,” Chloe 
persisted. (These intimate friends, with their 
curiosities!) However, Gilbert might arrive now 
at any moment. She would have to tell. 

“It’s Gilbert, Chloe. I’m expecting him here.” 

Moyra looked at Chloe intently. It was not 
for her to flinch. Some queer instinct made her 
watch Chloe’s face. She noticed a sudden flicker 
in Chloe’s eyes when she mentioned Gilbert’s 
name; and she had grown perceptibly paler. 

“My dearest, I’m most frightfully pleased,” 


NOBODY KNOWS 


129 


Chloe said at last. The words seemed to cost her 
an effort. “I always knew you two would get on 
well together. . . . Don’t you remember when 
you came to tea? But Gilbert platonic! It’s too 
funny.” She contrived a peal of unconvincing 
laughter, while Moyra, stricken to the heart, sat 
silent. “She is Gilbert’s wife,” her brain said. 
“She is his wife, and he is still her real husband. 
It’s all wrong.” 

Her face grew pale and her heart seemed to die 
within her breast. She wondered if she were 
going to faint. And all the time she listened to 
Chloe’s gush of words, and watched her growing 
nervousness. “You know, we haven’t met since, 
nor written to one another. He and George were 
very old friends. They were at Oxford together. 
And Gilbert’s frightfully nervy. ...” 

She suddenly turned and beckoned to her hus¬ 
band. George came heavily across to the table, 
folding his Daily Mail and clutching it under his 
arm. 

“Hullo!” he said, catching Moyra’s eye. 
“How are you?” He relapsed into a weighty 
silence, loaded with British phlegm. 

“Look here, George,” said Chloe, making an 
effort to rouse him, “we shall both meet Gilbert 
in a moment. There he is, I believe.” Her eyes 
had raked the Boul’ Mich’ anxiously, and in the 
far distance she had caught sight of a familiar 
figure in grey tweeds. 

“Oh!” said George, and paused. “I see.” 


130 


NOBODY KNOWS 


He looked inquiringly at Moyra, and observed 
again, “I see.” Beyond a vague resentment 
against Gilbert for having married his wife before 
he married her himself, George had absolutely 
no feeling about his former friend whatever. To 
the Maynard Brown mind, the “friends” who got 
in their path mattered no more than the crushed 
insect matters to the stampeding elephant. He 
had walked into Gilbert’s house and taken Chloe 
because he wanted a woman, and the unmarried 
ones would not look at him. Thanks to Gilbert’s 
penury, he had been able to secure Chloe at a 
bargain price. It was all perfectly satisfactory 
and “in order.” He hadn’t the least objection 
to meeting Gilbert; and as for Chloe, of course 
it couldn’t matter to her either. She was become 
his property—part of the Maynard Brown estate, 
on which people laid hands at their peril. 

George’s phlegm was superb: he was armour- 
plated and impervious. To Chloe, it was an 
exasperation. Her own nerves were shattered by 
it, and she knew quite enough about Gilbert’s 
to imagine, in advance, a “painful scene.” 
Moyra sat, with her bulging blue eyes full of 
resentment and anger against them both. She felt 
the beginning of a possessive feeling for Gilbert. 
These two wretches, they shouldn’t hurt him! 
She wouldn’t let them hurt him. They had for¬ 
feited the right to that supreme pleasure. For 
the moment the privilege was hers. And sud¬ 
denly he disentangled himself from the crowd, 


NOBODY KNOWS 131 

and stood before them—his face wreathed in 
smiles. 

“Well, I’m blessed!” he said. 

He and Chloe shook hands with the warmth of 
old friends. The intimacy of their laughter, which 
lacerated Moyra’s feminine vanity, was lost upon 
George. He waited heavily until Gilbert turned 
and offered his hand. In his capacity as the 
“aggrieved party”—for so, for reasons known 
only to the Maynard Brown mind, he had elected 
to regard himself—he paused, perceptibly, before 
accepting it. 

“Have a drink?” George suggested at last, 
more to fill in a pause than from any hospitable 
instinct. He did not want to buy Gilbert a drink. 
He really wanted to get rid of him and the evi¬ 
dently disreputable young woman, Chloe’s friend 
too, with whom he was obviously carrying on a 
clandestine intrigue. The immorality of these 
“Bohemians!” 

“Have a Suze-Anis-fine” said George rather 
peremptorily, as the waiter came up, flicked his 
napkin and uttered an interrogatory “M’sieu’?” 

“Thanks. It sounds poisonous as well as 
potent,” Gilbert replied. “I will.” 

The drink, “genre Pernod” and stiffly laced 
with brandy, helped him to keep control of his 
nerves, to preserve his sense of humour. He began 
to talk to Chloe about Gilbert junior. Gilbert 
junior, it appeared, was getting on very well. (He 
was at the preparatory house of a co-educational 


132 


NOBODY KNOWS 


school in Hampshire, the excellent head mistress 
of which specialised in taking “entire charge” 
of the unfortunate children of divorced parents.) 
Gillie, it appeared, had recently contracted whoop¬ 
ing cough, was now recovered and had asked 
tenderly after his daddie. 

“We must send him some chocolate bonbons,” 
said Moyra unexpectedly. 

What did she mean by that “we,” Gilbert 
wondered. Was she beginning, then, to accept 
him as her mate—despite her insistence on keeping 
him at arm’s length—or was she merely anxious to 
annoy Chloe? He knew perfectly well at the back 
of his mind that the latter explanation was the 
true one. 

The conversation, which had creaked a little at 
first, now became easy and agreeable. Chloe con¬ 
gratulated him on the huge success of “The Silent 
Stranger.” “I always told you you would pull it 
off one of these days,” she said, “and that when 
you did your early books would begin selling 
again.” They chatted, the three of them, upon a 
thousand topics, Paris, the pictures in the Louvre 
and the Luxembourg, books, the play, Shakespeare 
and Company, James Joyce and his “Ulysses,” 
Raymond Duncan. . . . Queer how quickly one 
woman could cure you of another! “Fixation” 
was the new word, wasn’t it? Well, he’d lost his 
“fixation” on Chloe, lost it absolutely. But 
much remained. It could not be otherwise after 
so many years of intimacy, physical and mental. 


NOBODY KNOWS 


133 


Up to a point, he knew so well the way her mind 
worked, knew it as well as he knew every detail of 
her body. They were still linked to one another 
in an odd sort of fashion, linked as she and 
George could never be linked, as he and Moyra 
could never be linked. There was no sentiment 
in this reflection, it was rather a realisation, how¬ 
ever dim, of the working of some natural law. 
about which mankind has agreed to forget. 

George was getting increasingly bored with 
their chatter. He wanted his luncheon. He rose 
and fixed Chloe with hard, Petruchio glance. “I 
think we’d better be going,” he said. 

Chloe dropped her sentence in the middle. 
“Yes, dear,” she replied, in submissive accents— 
the completely dominated woman, sensually thrill¬ 
ing with enjoyment of her domination. 

In a few moments the partings were over. 
Moyra and Gilbert sat on, outside the cafe, watch¬ 
ing the retreating forms of the Maynard Browns. 
He noticed that Moyra was looking depressed and 
unhappy—a solemn child, fearful and disturbed. 
He cursed the ill-luck which had put her in a 
false position; but he did not understand the 
reason for her melancholy and she did not try to 
explain it. 

“My dear, we’ll go away from this hateful 
city,” he said, after a pause. “We’ll go to Italy— 
to-morrow, to-night, if you like. We can come 
here again on our way home, if you want 


134 


NOBODY KNOWS 


“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go, Gilbert. As soon 
as possible.” 

Gilbert found it difficult to rouse her from her 
mood of depression. But with the years there 
comes an understanding of food, and of the part 
which (despite the romantics) it plays even in the 
highest emotions of which humanity is capable. 
He called a cab and they drove to Prunier’s, and 
drank with their oysters a bottle of that Pouilly for 
which the restaurant is justly famous. The wine 
slowly did its cheering work, and he began to talk 
to her about their journey, about Florence. One 
night would be enough to spend in Milan. They 
would imitate Cook’s tourists and cram the Brera, 
the Palazzo Poldi-Pezzoli, Leonardo’s “Last 
Supper,” Sant’ Ambrogio, and the Cathedral 
into a day and a half. Gilbert enlarged upon his 
detestation of Milan; but there were some pictures 
there which she could not miss. Perhaps they 
could stop there, though, on their way home. He 
was impatient to get to Florence, and infected 
Moyra with his eagerness. 

When they got back to the hotel, Gilbert found 
long letters from Tobey and from Cleopatra. 
Tobey was coming to Florence too, with Betty 
Carson, his latest “case.” She was, it appeared, 
“wonderful.” He had never been so smitten 
before! Her repressions had been released, 
according to Tobey’s usual formula, with the most 
gratifying results. He hoped that Gilbert was not 
contemplating matrimony with Moyra. Surely 


NOBODY KNOWS 


135 


the educational value of his first attempt had not 
been wholly lost? . . . Cleopatra was already in 
Italy with Austin Dodge, the playwright, and 
probably they would all meet. Dodge was Cleo¬ 
patra’s latest protege. She intended, he thought, 
to marry the poor man, in order to give him an 
interest in life. Apparently, one evening, after 
dancing with her, he had attempted to gas him¬ 
self, but had only partially succeeded. There 
was no holding Cleopatra these days. She had 
gone back to her grandmother with a vengeance, 
and had rejuvenated herself in a horrifying 
manner during the process. Prudence had grown 
now into a most abandoned young person, and 
had been acting as secretary to an amorous “wee 
free” politician, while Iseult had taken to posing 
before any old gentleman who would buy her 
a dinner. Altogether it was just as well that 
Belsize Towers was shut up and deserted by its 
former inmates, seeing that its old ideals were all 
forgotten. 

Cleopatra’s long outburst was written in violet 
ink on stone-coloured stationery adorned with a 
large monogram embossed in gold. In it she 
explained her reasons for closing Belsize Towers. 
“You can’t run a liberty hall without a licence, 
and licence is a thing which, after what I’ve seen 
of it, I don’t hold with. There’s a lot that’s bad 
about marriage, but on the whole, in my opinion 
it’s better than no marriage. So I hope, Bunny, 
you won’t just take this young girl you’re with 


136 


NOBODY KNOWS 


up the garden and leave her there. Now that you 
are earning good money and have a little capital 
behind you, you can make a nice home for her; 
and have some little loves of children to be a 
joy to you in your old age. Think how much nicer 
that would be than living like Tobey!” There was 
a great deal more in this vein. Gilbert read the 
letter aloud. 

They were sitting on the big bed in Moyra’s 
room, half-dressed, comfortable. The girl’s 
head was reposing on the curve of Gilbert’s 
arm. The barrier between them seemed to have 
bred a new strange tenderness. They were lovers 
and not lovers. Something more: something 
less. 

“My dear,” said Moyra, when Gilbert had 
finished Cleopatra’s letter, “don’t you see I can’t 
marry you? I can’t be your mistress either. I 
hate all that side of life. And I don’t want to have 
a child. I couldn’t bear the pain. I’m not a 
woman of that type. And I have my profession to 
think of. It’s as important to me as expression 
is to you. It’s my form of expression. . . . It’s 
no good, dear. I can’t help myself, or change 
myself. It’s hard for you, I know. But I have a 
horror of . . . all that. It disgusts me. I can’t 
explain it to you. Perhaps I don’t understand it 
myself.” 

With an impulsive gesture she threw her bare 
warm arm across his breast, and laid her cheek 
against his cheek. . . . 


NOBODY KNOWS 


137 


Gilbert felt as if a hand of ice had been laid 
upon his heart, and when her lips sought his and 
she held him in a tender but completely passionless 
embrace, despair came upon him . . . despair 
and fear. 


CHAPTER XVI 


At all costs, he must not spoil her holiday. 
This had been a wretched day. First that unlucky 
meeting with Chloe and George Maynard Brown, 
and now this tormenting discussion about mar¬ 
riage. He could see that it was her friendship 
for him, her anxiety not to hurt him which, by 
forcing a conflict with her own nature, or with 
what she believed to be her own nature, was mak¬ 
ing her so unhappy. The only thing to be done 
was to leave this dreary Paris straightaway and 
trust to the healing Italian sunshine to charm away 
their malise. 

Moyra fell in eagerly with his suggestion that 
they should travel that night, and by good fortune 
they found two berths left in the sleeping car. The 
humours of the journey to Milan were a relief to 
both of them. Most of the other berths were 
reserved by a firm of English tourist agents for 
their “select, first-class autumn tour, for ladies and 
gentlemen only, to the historic cities of sunny 
Italy, personally conducted throughout.” The 
personal conductor, a sandy-haired young man 
with an extremely nervous and emotional manner, 
evidently unused to his job and with some ap- 


NOBODY KNOWS 


139 


parent distaste for it, rushed wildly from one end 
of the corridor of the sleeping-car carriage to the 
other. 

Heads appeared at the doors of compartments, 
and questions popped at him as he ran. “Will 
our luggage be all right, Mr. Burns?” “What 
time do we get to Milan?” “Can you tell me 
the name of our hotel?” The heads were of all 
descriptions and sexes. There were clerical heads, 
and spinsterish heads, and heads of festive old 
bounders, and heads of extemporary captains, 
heads of gay young things, and heads like horses. 
Mr. Burns winced at every question, and grew more 
and more distraught. He had a piece of paper in 
his hand, evidently containing a list of his flock. 
Whenever he answered a question, he tried breath¬ 
lessly to identify the questioner. “Excuse me, 
are you Mrs. Firkins? Are you Captain Tupp? 
Are you Mr. Horsefall?” The clergyman denied 
indignantly that he was Captain Tupp; Captain 
Tupp was equally emphatic that he was not 
Mr. Horsefall. 

Moyra and Gilbert stepped down on the plat¬ 
form in order to get a better view of these strange 
proceedings. “I’m sure I’ve got one of them in 
with me,” Moyra said. “I never saw anyone 
quite like it before.” 

“There is no one quite like them,” Gilbert 
replied. “They are unique. Where they go to 
when they get back to England, it’s impossible to 
imagine. Perhaps the provinces shelter them. 


140 NOBODY KNOWS 

Marvellous thought: but I shan’t go to Wigan to 
see.” 

“Mine’s from Bootle,” Moyra observed. “She 
has a large flask of brandy, too, and she gave me 
some out of a little cup.” 

By this time Mr. Burns was in a state of frenzy. 
“Where is Mrs. Valentine?” he cried in heart¬ 
rending accents. “Has anyone seen her?” But 
nobody had seen Mrs. Valentine. None of the 
select ladies and gentlemen had ever experienced 
Mrs. Valentine in all their lives. 

With a cry like a wounded animal, Mr. Bums 
precipitated himself through the carriage door and 
fled along the platform. It was but ten minutes 
before the train was due to start. Gilbert and 
Moyra waited in thrilled expectancy. 

“What’s the betting he doesn’t get her?” said 
Gilbert. “I’ll lay you ten francs he is left 
behind.” 

Moyra took his bet. The minutes slowly ticked 
away. Meanwhile some of Mr. Burns’ agitation 
had communicated itself to his party. 66 Where is 
our conductor?” asked, in ominous accents, a 
lady with a large grey face, lorgnettes and expen¬ 
sive furs. She was a formidable lady. 

“En voiture, en voiture /” cried the guard. 
The platform began to empty. 

“I say, it’s too bad!” said Captain Tupp to the 
Reverend Mr. Horsefall. “That fellow’s got all 
our tickets on him, that conductor chap. And the 


NOBODY KNOWS 141 

train’s just off. It’s due to start in ninety- 
seconds.” 

“Good heavens!” cried the formidable lady. 
“All lost! Our tickets, everything! It is 
monstrous, monstrous! I shall wire to his 
employers. Fancy sending out a man like that 
to conduct a party!” 

At this point all the heads emerged, together 
with the forms belonging to them. The corridor 
was crowded with anxious faces. The train was 
now on the point of starting, and Gilbert and 
Moyra had become infected with the general con¬ 
sternation. “Poor wretch,” said Moyra. “It’s all 
up now. You’ve won your ten francs all right.” 

But no. At the very last instant minute there 
appeared at the far end of the platform a dis¬ 
traught man who seized by the arm a small, agi¬ 
tated and rather plump lady. How they ran! The 
lady’s little bag was dropped, fell open, was 
picked up. And again they ran. They grew 
nearer. Slowly the train began to move. “Jump 
in!” shouted the terrorised flock to their wandering 
shepherd. “Jump in, man!” But the shepherd 
had not forgotten his duty. Mrs. Valentine must 
be got on board first, tickets or no tickets. Pant¬ 
ing and purple, the unfortunate woman was half 
pushed, half dragged up the steps of the carriage, 
Mr. Burns following her head-first into the corri¬ 
dor. 

For some minutes everyone was deprived of 
speech. Moyra’s friend from Bootle produced her 


142 


NOBODY KNOWS 


brandy and her little cup and endeavoured to 
restore the fainting Mrs. Valentine. Mr. Burns 
gasped in an agony compounded of physical dis¬ 
comfort, terror, and professional shame. But at 
last he pulled himself together and did his best to 
soothe down his perturbed clients. Mrs. Valen¬ 
tine, thanks perhaps to the brandy or to a tempera¬ 
mental incapacity to remember anything for long, 
was the quickest to chirp up. “I just thought I’d 
go and look at some of the shops outside the 
station,” she explained. “And then I suppose I 
got lost. It was clever of Mr. Burns to find me, 
wasn’t it?” She smiled archly at the young man, 
who, grateful at that moment for a kind word even 
from an imbecile, became quite flustered with 
pleasure. But the recognition of his cleverness 
was confined to the lady who had experienced it. 
Captain Tupp snorted, and Mr. Horsefall looked 
towards heaven and made noises in his throat. 
The formidable lady, Mrs. Masters, observed 
icily: “It wouldn’t have been very clever if he had 
left us to travel to Milan without our tickets.” 
Apparently somewhere in Mr. Burns’ make-up was 
a sense of humour. Captain Tupp’s snorts had 
made him blench, but Mrs. Masters’ asperity gave 
him an attack of violent giggles which he was 
observed by Gilbert to be making a gigantic effort 
to control. 

Gilbert liked the look of Mr. Burns. An hour 
or two later, when Moyra had gone to bed, he 
walked down the train and finding the conductor in 


NOBODY KNOWS 


143 


an empty first-class smoking carriage, he walked 
in. He had that sudden hunger for contact with his 
own sex which so many men experience when they 
travel with a woman, however deeply loved she 
may be. 

“Rather a tiresome job, yours, I should think,” 
Gilbert observed. 

Mr. Bums smiled. 

“But it takes me to Italy,” he said. There was 
a light in his eye with which Gilbert immediately 
sympathised. “And the people interest me,” he 
went on, “when I am not being bothered with 
them. They’re all so queer, and different, and 
improbable. This sort of business makes me 
understand why reviewers of novels, when they 
meet characters in books who are not like them¬ 
selves, so often get pent up about it. What 
horrible and disgusting types! How absolutely 
unlike life! How absurdly exaggerated! As 
if people ever behaved like that — and so forth. 
My party is far more incredible to me than the 
characters in any novel I ever read. I can scarcely 
believe they’re really true, even now.” 

“I suppose we English tend to divide up into 
smallish groups,” said Gilbert, “and unless 
something happens, like a war or the accidents and 
chances of foreign travel, to mix us up, we go 
through our lives in blank ignorance of what all 
the other groups are like, except our own.” 

“Have you ever looked,” Mr. Burns said reflec¬ 
tively, “at the funny places on the map of 


144 


NOBODY KNOWS 


England that you’ve never been to and never intend 
to go to, and wondered what on earth the people 
were like who lived in them? I have. I used at 
one time to think we were all much the same, and 
that the only differences were the usual differences 
of class and education and accent. We are 
not. There are people in my crowd who come 
from places like Middlesborough, who bear no 
more resemblance to Londoners or south country 
Englishmen than Esquimaux do. And I’ve some 
still more fantastic humans, who come from 
Potton, wherever Potton is. They are strange, 
very strange. They take Potton with them wher¬ 
ever they go, talk Potton, think Potton. One 
never could have inmagined that so many events of 
such epoch-making importance could conceivably 
have happened at Potton. Why, the chronicles 
of Potton were poured into my ear even in the 
Louvre, when I was trying to look at the 
Giorgione. For days I’ve lived in Potton, at 
second-hand. And Potton will be taken to 
Florence, to Rome, to Venice, to Naples. 
Whispers from Potton will come to me upon the 
Grand Canal. Potton will blend with the savage 
Roman sunset, when I watch it once again from 
Trinita dei Monti; it will enter the Blue Grotto at 
Capri; blend itself with the melancholy plash of 
fountains in the gardens of the Villa d’Este. 
Thank the Lord, I shall be able to escape fairly 
often, though. The Italian guides do most of the 
actual conducting, once we get started. . . .” 


NOBODY KNOWS 


145 


Mr. Bums lit another of his innumerable 
gaspers — he seemed to be a chain smoker, and his 
nerves were obviously in rags — and Gilbert left 
him, as Lockitt leaves McHeath, to his “private 
meditations.” They were to be assisted, it seemed, 
by the Loeb Petronius, one of J. S. Fletcher’s de¬ 
tective stories, a tattered copy of Aleister Crow¬ 
ley’s book of sonnets, “Clouds without Water,” 
and Paul Morand’s “Ouvert la Nuit.” A bottle of 
red wine lay shamelessly in the rack above his 
head, resting upon the tickets of his party and a 
bundle of receipted bills. Mr. Burns, Gilbert 
guessed, was quite as much a surprise to the 
inhabitants of Potton as they were to him. 

As he made his way back to his berth, he over¬ 
heard a fragment of conversation from an open 
door. The ladies inside, plump Cockneys, were 
having a friendly gossip before going to bed. . . . 

“There she was,” said one of them, “at ten in 
the morning, sitting at the piano in ’er 
noode /” 

“She must have been mad, dear,” the other 
replied. 

“Oh, no, she wasn’t, dear. She was strainge, 
I grant yew, but not mad.” 

“Strainge, I grant yew!” Gilbert went off 
to bed, chuckling. The whole adventure of life 
was the strangest thing imaginable. The only 
two classes of people who could ever know any¬ 
thing for certain were the true believers and the 
indubitably mad! 


CHAPTER XVII 


Milan was the usual disappointment. The 
hard, bright, noisy northern city was, too clearly, 
not the Italy of which Moyra had so often 
dreamed. They spent a morning at the Brera, 
looking at the Crivellis, the Bellinis, and the 
Mantegnas; they lunched at Biffi’s in the vast 
windy Galleria; they wandered in and out of the 
beautiful unreal Cathedral. They drove out to 
Sant’ Ambrogio, that sun-baked Byzantine marvel 
of delicious brick, saw the Leonardo on their way 
home, and then explored the treasures in the 
Palazzo Poldi-Pezzoli and sniffed the aroma of 
Second Empire Connoisseur exhaled by that pecu¬ 
liarly human house. They were tiring days, but 
Mr. Burns and his select party provided plenty 
of comic relief. Gilbert had insisted on going to 
the same hotel as Mr. Bums, to whom he was be¬ 
ginning to become attached. The sight of Mr. 
Burns ‘‘functioning” was a thing not to be missed. 
Trembling in every limb, sweating, occasionally 
gesticulating, talking torrentially in his ungram¬ 
matical French to Concierge and Manager and 
Head Waiter, the conductor ran from end to end 
of the hotel lounge like a rat in a cage pursued 
146 


NOBODY KNOWS 


147 


by an army of terriers. The ladies and gentlemen 
of his select party, knowing that they had him at 
their mercy, could not leave him alone. Their 
nerves were in rags after their long journey from 
Paris, but so, of course, were Burns’. The Rever¬ 
end Horsefall (secretly addicted to an abdominal 
belt) had been made to share a room with Captain 
Tupp. No one knew what physical dark secret it 
was which the gallant Captain wished to keep hid¬ 
den, but his anger at not having a room to himself 
was no less vehement than the clergyman’s. The 
redoubtable Mrs. Masters had been put in a room 
overlooking the street. The tramcars would be 
certain to keep her awake! The noise would kill 
her! It was monstrous! Her room must be 
changed immediately. “But the hotel is absolutely 
full,” murmured Mr. Burns. “Then I shall write 
to your employers,” Mrs. Masters snapped. Her 
eyes gleamed balefully. 

And then, to crown everything, to put the 
comble on the conductor’s misery, Mrs. Valentine 
once more had got lost. Nobody had set eyes on 
her for hours and hours. She missed her lunch¬ 
eon, she missed Mr. Burns’ personally conducted 
excursion to the world-famous Cathedral. Milan 
had engulfed her. 

Moyra and Gilbert encountered the distracted 
Burns in the midst of his troubles. His mobile 
face, which expressed every shadow of emotion in 
the plainest terms, now expressed a longing for 
their help and companionship which was not to 


148 


NOBODY KNOWS 


be resisted. “Oh, my God,” he gasped. Then 
he sank into a chair and roared with laughter. 
“I wish I could cut and run,” he said. “Fancy 
being in Italy and tied by the leg to a menagerie 
like this! I’ve a good mind to leave them their 
passports with the concierge, and enough money, 
and let them fend for themselves.” 

Moyra and Gilbert comforted and encouraged 
him as best they could, and he gradually re¬ 
covered his composure. “Come on,” said Moyra. 
“We’ll find your Mrs. Valentine for you.” 

“She’s either in the Cathedral or strolling 
round the Piazza,” Gilbert remarked. “They 
always are.” He took Burns’ arm and helped him 
to his feet, and the three of them set out in pursuit 
of the lost sheep. When they got into the Galleria, 
Gilbert suggested a drink. They sat outside Biffi’s 
and watched the crowd. “If we sit here long 
enough she’s sure to turn up,” said Gilbert, 
tempting. He liked Burns’ boyish smile, his 
naughtiness, his “truant” quality. Though he 
scarcely realised it, he was clutching at Burns to 
save his own sanity. He wished that Moyra 
would go, and for once in a way his wishes coin¬ 
cided with her own. “I think I’ll go back to the 
hotel to do some reading,” she said. “I hope 
you’ll find her, Mr. Burns.” Mr. Burns received 
the impact of Moyra’s charm, then glanced envi¬ 
ously at Gilbert, then — since he was observant — 
sympathetically. Gilbert was “going through 
it,” he noticed, and he himself had been “going 


NOBODY KNOWS 


149 


through it” — though in a different way — for 
over a year. He recognised the symptoms. 

The pleasant, rather operatic uniforms, the 
dramatic cloaks, cocked hats and waving feathers 
which help to decorate the Italian scene, made 
points of interest in the black-coated crowd which 
sauntered up and down under the high glass roof. 
It was fun to sit, with a pink drink in front of 
you, withdrawn like this, watching. Their 
thoughts were communicated without speech — the 
telepathy of everyday life which is too common to 
attract attention. “What we all want,” said Gilbert 
at last, “is a nice, comfortable, bomb-proof dug- 
out. Somewhere where we can be safe from 
people and passions. Or where we can get some 
help in making ourselves safe from them.” 

“I used to think I enjoyed a good bit of 
misery,” Burns remarked, puffing meditatively at 
his inevitable Macedonia cigarette. “It kept one 
alive, kept one violent, kept the fat off one’s soul 
— so I used to argue. Now, ^’m not sure. 
What’s that that Blake says about “abstinence 
throws sand all over, the ruddy limbs and flaming 
hair, but Desire gratified plants seeds of life and 
beauty there?” There’s probably something in 
that. There usually is in Mr. Blake’s observations, 
I notice. You know, I believe unhappiness is in 
a way a line of least resistance. A really good 
first-class joy is a thing that many people over 
thirty would shrink from, in terror, because it 
might come to an end. The young things who 


150 


NOBODY KNOWS 


would jump at it wouldn’t appreciate it till it was 
over. They never do. With misery, on the other 
hand, one is fairly safe. It has a certain motive 
force in it for the creative artist: and you know 
that when things can’t get very much worse, the 
chances are that they will get better. Love 
torments, with me, have a time limit: three years. 
I know from bitter experiences that it’s only a 
case of sticking it out.” 

“And to be loved, one has only to be com¬ 
pletely indifferent” Gilbert broke in, irrelevantly. 
“It’s all so absurd and, in an odd sort of a way 
undignified. One ought to be ‘indifferent’ all the 
time — self-contained. It’s only a question of 
exercising proper control over the ridiculous 
appetites which nature has planted in us. . . .” 

“Only!” said Burns, and whistled. 

Gilbert laughed. “Don’t imagine I live up to 
my principles, my dear boy. I wish I did. I 
believe firmly in complete non-morality in every¬ 
thing relating to the physical side of sex, I believe 
in friendship — the ‘beyond he and she’ — and 
yet by instinct I am the conventional possessive 
male, yearning for children, a settled home, 
family life and all the rest of it. Can’t get my 
middle-class British respectability out of my 
system.” 

“What a fearful thing!” said Burns. “Have 
another Americano? It’ll do you good.” Burns’ 
fits of giggles were infectious. Their drinks were 
brought, and they began to look at the crowd once 


NOBODY KNOWS 


151 


more. Night was upon them now. The roof of 
the Gallery had grown dark purple blue, and the 
lights of the shops and cafes shone out in two 
long glittering lines. They looked without much 
interest at the ceaseless procession of prostitutes, 
who all turned their heads as they passed Biffi’s 
and raked the tables for potential clients. “They 
cost half as much as a genuine clergyman’s 
daughter from Tooting and give you twice the 
pleasure, I believe,” said Burns. “And yet it 
can’t be done, somehow. It isn’t we who are the 
coarse sex. There isn’t a woman born who is so 
physically fastidious, so easily put off and dis¬ 
gusted as the average civilised man.” 

“Isn’t it rather that they have a different 
conception of what is disgusting?” Gilbert asked. 

Burns admitted it. “But ours is the right one,” 
he added. Gilbert thanked him in his heart for 
that touch of masculine swank. Their friendship 
had been growing during this desultory conver¬ 
sation, as friendships do grow, unperceived and 
apparently without cause. Gilbert was conscious 
of a sudden desire to go away with Burns, to run 
away with him, to Rome or to Florence. It was 
on the tip of his tongue — for a joke — to put his 
caprice into words when his companion leapt to 
his feet, knocked his chair over and shouted 
“There she is!” 

Gilbert saw a small, plump, perfectly placid, 
middle-aged woman wandering slowly towards 
them. A childish, quite vacant smile was spread 


152 


NOBODY KNOWS 


over her face: she looked perfectly happy. Burns 
had become transformed at the sight of her: a 
professional man again. “There you are, at 
last, Mrs. Valentine,” he cried. “We’ve been 
looking for you everywhere.” Burns was 
functioning. 


CHAPTER XVIII 

Arrived at Florence, Gilbert and Moyra took 
rooms in a gloomy hotel near the Piazza della 
Signoria and gave themselves up frankly to sight¬ 
seeing. For a week they were caught out of 
themselves, forgetful of everything save the uni¬ 
maginable beauty stored and treasured in this 
flower of cities. The spell would probably have 
remained longer upon them both had they not, 
upon a sunny morning, encountered Cleopatra and 
her entire escort outside the offices of Thomas 
Cook and Son in the Via Tornabuoni. Cleopatra 
descended upon them like an avalanche. “My 
darling chickabiddies,” she cried, “how happy you 
both look!” She kissed Moyra with resounding 
emphasis, without waiting for an introduction, 
while Austin Dodge watched, impassively, twisting 
his monocle. Tobey and Betty Carson were less 
effusive. Tobey, indeed, seemed rather bored. 
When Cleopatra had finished saying how d’you do 
and had paused in her recital of all her adventures 
during the past few months, Tobey interposed 
plaintively to say that he wanted his luncheon. 
“Come on, all of you,” said Cleopatra, who had 
lost none of her hospitable instincts since the 
153 


154 


NOBODY KNOWS 


closing of Belsize Towers, “we’ll have lunch at 
the palace. Stop some cabs, Tobey.” Some 
cabs were stopped, and the party fitted in to 
them. Cleopatra called the furnished villa which 
she had taken on the outskirts of Florence, about a 
mile beyond the Ponte Rosso, “the Palace,” in the 
naive belief that Palazzo was the generic name for 
any Florentine house. But if the Villa Flora could 
not be described as a palace, it had everything else 
to recommend it. Set in an enchanting garden 
walled in by ilex trees, the old yellow house with 
its broad loggias met its incoming tenants with 
an air of mild surprise. It seemed politely to 
raise its eyebrows at them. The management of 
the place, which would have been quite outside 
Cleopatra’s capacities, had been taken over by 
Austin Dodge, who spoke Italian fairly fluently, 
having lived for a year or two in Italy in the days 
of his prosperity. He it was who superintended 
the Italian servants, ordered the meals and paid 
the bills. Since Cleopatra insisted, in her lavish 
way, in asking every casual acquaintance encount¬ 
ered in a morning walk to come to see her, Mr. 
Dodge’s duties as major-domo were by no means 
light. It was impossible to tell whether ten or 
twenty people would be lunching or dining at the 
Villa—Cleopatra never remembered her invitations 
until the guests arrived—and food must be pro¬ 
vided for all who chose to turn up. This morning 
the crowd of convives was unusually large. Guests 
were strolling about the Villa gardens, and others 


NOBODY KNOWS 


155 


were smoking cigars in the hall. Of these, the 
first to attract Gilbert’s notice was, of all people 
in the world, Louis Mathers. Those insolent 
shoulders were unmistakable; and no one but 
Mathers would present to his hostess a back view 
of which a large rent in the seat of his trousers 
was the most conspicuous ornament. Having 
made his effect, Mathers turned sharply from the 
paper he was examining and strode towards Cleo¬ 
patra as if he intended to sweep her up into his 
arms and convey her into her own garden for an 
ecstatic embrace. He surged towards her, caught 
her hand in his and bent tenderly over it. Cleopatra 
was visibly moved as she expressed her delight at 
seeing him. A small, thin-lipped man, with smooth 
dark hair and dark eyes under lashes of a black¬ 
ness which accentuated the pallor of his skin, was 
the next to greet his hostess, when Mathers had 
introduced him. His name was Aubrey Sutton. 
Then two girls came in from the garden, one of 
them—Mabel Watson—red-haired and freckled, 
with jeering blue eyes and an expression half prig¬ 
gish and half truculent, the other a long-legged 
child of sixteen or seventeen, with bobbed brown 
hair and wide-open roguish eyes accustomed to see 
the absurdity of a world formed expressly for her 
enjoyment. She was dressed in a plain frock of 
gentian blue and wore a Panama hat trimmed with 
a thin ribbon of the same colour as her frock. Her 
name was Margery Vincent. “Hullo,” she cried. 
“We’re awfully glad you’ve come, Mrs. Leigh- 


156 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Perms. Mabel and I were fighting like cats, 
through sheer hunger.” 

“Come right along in, children,” said Cleopatra. 
“I brought Moyra Burden and Gilbert Vayle along 
too. This is them”—she smiled and waved a mas¬ 
sive arm. “So now you know one another!” 

They surged into the large dining-room where 
the hors d’ceuvres —red tomatoes, pale sliced 
cucumber, fish salads, beetroot—made pleasant 
spots of colour on the table, and sat down amid a 
buzz of conversation. Gilbert sat opposite Moyra, 
who was next to Mabel Watson, and on his right 
was Margery Vincent. Tobey and his Betty were 
lower down. 

“I do wish Mother were here,” said Margery 
to Gilbert. “She couldn’t come because she’s gone 
to Lucca to see something, and left me with Mabel. 
Mabel is supposed to look after me, but really it’s 
the other way round. I have to threaten her with 
Mother’s disapproval or else she’d stay out in the 
cafes all night talking about art. I can’t talk about 
art, can you?” 

Gilbert secretly rather thought he could, when 
adequately in liquor, but he hastened to deny the 
suggestion. “You’d like Mother,” Margery con¬ 
tinued, “she’s so frightfully amusing. Sometimes 
we are taken for sisters. Of course, she’s only my 
stepmother really, you know. She loves a rag. 
Do you know who that old man is with the long 
pointed nose and the wicked grey hair?” 

Louis Mathers, at this moment, cast in Gilbert’s 


NOBODY KNOWS 


157 


direction a glance that was almost a wink. Then 
he heaved his shoulders and swooped down again, 
conversationally, upon his hostess. Cleopatra was 
reduced by the impact into girlish giggles, and 
Gilbert watched Louis refilling her glass with 
the admirable Montepulciano which Dodge had 
ordered, and wondered what would happen. A 
faint purple tinge was already beginning to mount 
to Cleopatra’s cheek-bones. “Oh, yes,” said 
Gilbert, “he’s an old friend of mine. That is 
Mr. Louis Mathers, the poet. He spends most of 
the year in Italy now, but the last time I met him 
was in London.” 

“Oh, that’s Mr. Mathers, is it?” said Margery, 
with awakened interest. “Mother doesn’t like him 
and wouldn’t introduce him the other day. But I 
think lie’s rather attractive. I like old men. They 
know such a lot. We spent the summer in Bavaria,” 
she went on, inconsequently. “Do you know 
Bavaria? Mummy likes the people because they 
are artists, and I like them because my real mother 
was a Bavarian. They dance and sing and drink 
and paint funny pictures on their houses. There’s 
a lake where we go to, and when you’ve bathed in 
it you can lie out in the sun and look up at the 
mountains. We’ve got a chalet just by the lake 
side. We’re going there again next summer. But 
I shan’t stay there, of course. You see, I’m a 
Wandervogel.” This last was announced with 
extraordinary pride. 

“Whatever is a Wandervogel?” Gilbert asked. 


158 


NOBODY KNOWS 


“Well, you see, in Germany they’re all rather 
fed up with their fathers and mothers and with all 
the bad ideas that led to the war and to all the 
misery and rottenness that are about everywhere 
at present. They want to get right back to the 
old Germany, the Germany of the Meistersingers, 
the beautiful Germany of the old legends and 
traditions. And so everywhere there are societies 
of boys and of girls, and sometimes mixed ones 
of boys and girls together. They are what you 
might call blood brotherhoods. You wouldn’t 
understand, I expect, because you are pre-war.” 

“Good Lord!” said Gilbert, thoughtfully, “so 
I am.” 

“Mummy’s pre-war too, but she does under¬ 
stand, a bit. The Wandervogels I belong to are 
half boys and' half girls. Our leader is a girl, 
Hilde Ebenhocht. Oh, she’s so lovely! We’d 
any of us do anything for her, and her orders are 
carried out implicitly.” 

“And what do you do?” Gilbert asked, with 
growing interest. 

“We go out together and walk for weeks 
through the woods and over the mountains. We 
sleep in the open or in a hiitte or Gasthaus, and 
we sing and dance and talk and bathe. Hans, 
who is my friend, is very, very serious. He was 
a Communist once, but he isn’t now. He’s gone 
to the other extreme. He thinks the break-up of 
European civilisation is inevitable, and that the 
only thing to do is to face it philosophically. He 


NOBODY KNOWS 


159 


sings beautifully, and won’t drink or smoke like 
other German boys. I am sure he will be a poet.” 

“And how old is he?” Gilbert asked. 

“Hans is nearly eighteen. He was a boy of ten 
when the war broke out, and his parents nearly died 
in trying to keep him properly fed—the Hunger 
Blockade, you know. But since the war stopped 
and he has started being a Wandervogel he has 
got awfully fit and strong. He’s hard as nails 
now and can walk for miles and miles without 
getting tired, and he’s a wonderful climber, 
too.” 

Gilbert was conscious of a vague hunger for a 
country of song and dance, of mountains, sunshine, 
lakes and woods, where youth was very, very 
serious and was—youth. He looked across at 
Moyra who, with flushed face and passionate 
enthusiasm, was talking art to Mabel. Mabel’s 
enthusiasm was no less strident. They hurled 
great names at one another. “Is it really a 
Giorgione?” asked Moyra, referring to that 
famous picture “The Concert” in the Pitti 
Palace. “After all, there’s only Berenson’s 
authority for the attribution.” Mabel seemed to 
understand Mr. Berenson’s reasons better than the 
famous critic could possibly have understood them 
himself. She expounded. She said, “Ah, but 
did you notice”; and “Yes, but when you 
compare .” They were so busy playing the game 
of rival erudition that they scarcely had time to 
eat or drink. When Cleopatra rose, rather flushed 


160 


NOBODY KNOWS 


and unsteady from her seat, they were still deeply 
occupied in displaying to one another the choicest 
wares in their respective shop windows. “What 
a fool I am!” thought Gilbert to himself, “what 
a fool I am!” He would have given much, just 
then, for Chloe’s understanding laugh. The laugh 
was against him, not against Moyra. After all, 
she had a perfect right to be herself, and it was just 
as unfortunate for her to find herself in a false 
position as it was for him to discover in her the 
school-marm preordained. Moyra showed no 
anxiety whatever to leave Cleopatra’s hospitable 
roof, and the friendship which she had struck up 
with Mabel Watson seemed to be instantaneous and 
violent. Gilbert was not precisely jealous, though 
jealousy entered into his feeling of being com¬ 
pletely baffled, frustrated. He liked the things 
Moyra liked, but in a completely different way: 
his sense of proportion was not, could never be 
hers. Again, there came over him a surge of 
irritation. Why was he wasting his time and 
emotional energy over a girl who had nothing to 
give him in return? The charm of the unattainable 
was over-rated. He knew that for him “only ful¬ 
filment will do, complete fulfilment here in the 
flesh.” And so he began to withdraw and detach 
himself. From Tobey also he detached himself, 
and from Cleopatra: from the whole crowd of 
them. And when he had completely detached 
himself, found himself secret and buried and out 
of sight behind his own unusually vivacious con- 


NOBODY KNOWS 


161 


versation, he felt happier. They all thought he 
was there. Ah, but he wasn’t, though. He 
wasn’t there at all. His intimates had become 
strangers. He had crossed into his stronghold, 
and the drawbridge had been pulled up with a 
clang, so that none could follow him. 

In the cool, artificial twilight of the great 
loggia he reclined at full length on a garden chair 
and listened to the talk which flowed all round 
him. Tobey’s enthusiastic “Oooh” came at inter¬ 
vals from a far corner where he was talking con¬ 
traceptives to a large, bright, hard American 
woman who pranced about Europe preaching 
rational and hygienic love. Miss Kate Crocker of 
New York City had “blown in” after luncheon in 
order to work off some of her surplus activity. 
Unless she used the words “sublimate,” “libido,” 
“Wasserman test,” “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” 
“orgasm,” and “birth control,” so many times in 
every hour she became irritable and discontented, 
like a dipsomaniac when the pubs are closed. In 
Tobey she had found a sympathetic, indeed, an 
enthusiastic, listener. The echoes of the con¬ 
versation which came to Gilbert’s ears made him 
feel faintly sick. They discussed love as 
enraptured hypochrondriacs might discuss dys¬ 
pepsia, constipation, uric acid and all the other 
similar topics with which idle and empty people 
while away the mauvais quart d’heure before 
death. Louis Mathers, Dodge and Aubrey Sutton 
were talking rather witty scandal about the English 


162 


NOBODY KNOWS 


colony in Florence. They were grouped round 
the vast, immobile figure of Cleopatra as beggars 
might group themselves in the sunshine on the 
pedestal of a statue. Gilbert wondered if Louis 
would forget himself and strike a match on her. 
Away in the garden, among the olives and the 
ilexes, Moyra and Mabel Watson were talking Art. 
And now and then he could see, flitting about by 
herself among the trees and shrubs, the gay little 
figure of the Wandervogel in her gentian blue 
frock. She was beautiful to watch, and her youth 
and brightness made everyone else seem stuffy, 
jaded and used up, by contrast. . . . 

Suddenly the figure of Cleopatra became 
animate once more. She took three breaths of 
a prodigious depth; her great bosom rose and 
fell under its covering of purple silk; her eyes 
opened; she sighed deeply; she took notice; she 
spoke. “It’s a nice afternoon,” she said. “I’m 
going into the garden.” A look of consternation 
came over Louis Mathers’ face: but his repose 
was not in danger. Cleopatra liked giving him 
food, and would have enjoyed sewing up his 
trousers, but otherwise she was not interested in 
him. Her eye roved over her guests. She looked 
at Tobey and at Kate Crocker, and snorted. She 
gazed out into the garden where Moyra and Mabel 
Watson were deep in their discussions, and then, 
with puzzled eyes, she looked at Gilbert. “Come 
along, Gilbert,” she exclaimed, “and help me get 
an appetite for dinner.” 


NOBODY KNOWS 163 

When they reached the garden, Cleopatra took 
his arm. “You must come and see my fountain,” 
she urged. “It’s one of the best in Florence, so 
Austin says.” The fountain was at the end of a 
long, shaded moss-grown path—a marvel of 
decayed baroque. Water gushed from a gigantic 
bearded mouth into a round shallow basin where 
stone dolphins lashed their tails in a turmoil of 
green water, surrounding a Venus rising from a 
mimic sea. The place was infinitely cool, shut 
in by trees—green and silent, save for a soothing 
plash and murmur. “I like to come here when 
I’ve got the hump,” said Cleopatra, expressing in 
her homely way the kind of emotion which carries 
a poet through a volume of sonnets. “I don’t 
understand the art of it like Austin, but I like it 
all the same,” she added. There was a wooden 
bench facing the fountain, placed there by Cleo¬ 
patra’s orders, and here they sat and talked. 
“I’ve bin very happy with my money on the 
whole,” said Cleopatra, thoughtfully. “I shouldn’t 
know how to spend it if I hadn’t a man to help me. 
It’s Austin, that’s given me this. His brains and 
knowledge had a lot more to do with it really than 
my cheques. Left to myself, I’d have a stuffy 
big house in a suburb, a thieving chauffeur, per¬ 
petual indigestion and a swarm of little dogs. 
Now look at me—here in this lovely place, with a 
crowd of young things all round me to keep me 
cheerful. I’ve had luck, Gilbert, and that’s a 
fact.” 


164 


NOBODY KNOWS 


“You old dear!” said Gilbert, linking his arm 
in hers. “You old dear!” 

“And now tell me all about it,” said Cleopatra. 
“I don’t know much of what you’d call knowledge, 
but I know something about life, and I can see you 
are not as happy as I want you to be. She’s not 
your type, you know, Gilbert, if I may say so, 
charming and pretty as she is. . . .” Cleopatra, 
from het fleshly eminence, gazed down at Gilbert 
with the wise smile of a mother confessor. 

“No, I’m afraid I’m not built for a platonic 
love affair,” Gilbert replied. “And Moyra, bless 
her heart, is a woman’s woman, not a man’s. 
She’s made that way. It can’t be helped. I 
suppose we are both of us lucky to have found it 
out in time. We might have tied ourselves up, 
and got to hate one another—destroyed one 
another.” 

“It’s a difficult job, dearie, to get over things— 
but no one can make anything good out of their 
lives if they don’t. These novels with their glorifi¬ 
cation of fools who live on unrequited love, 
simply make me sick. Self-respect lies in taking 
your drink of disappointment like a man and in 
not making faces over it. But when you do find 
a nice woman of your own kind who really cares 
for you, remember that all the real romance in life 
lies in making the best of your partner. If only 
all these silly young women would understand 
that when passion wears out it’s then, and not 
before, that the real thing starts! Oh, yes, I know 


NOBODY KNOWS 


165 


that every man and every woman has an ideal 
mate, and it stands to reason it can’t ever be the 
one they are married to. It wouldn’t be “ideal” 
if it were. We all have to have our dreams. We 
need them to help us over the difficult moments. 
But the art of life, my dear, is making the best of 
what the Fates have sent us in the way of a partner. 
I know. I know what sort of man a woman can 
live with and even get to like, if she tries hard 
enough. And I know what women can do with the 
men they marry. You men are our material, 
Gilbert. We make sons and we make husbands— 
or mar them. But the average wife nowadays 
will turn a decent, hard-working and successful 
man into an ill-conditioned failure, and then 
leave him for a new grand passion, with the 
applause of all the feminists to back her. It’s 
all wrong, Gilbert. I just hate this new-fangled 
nonsense about marriage being hell, and women 
being slaves and all that. Of course, it’s hell: 
and I’ll tell you for why. It’s hell because of 
three things, which are common to both sexes— 
selfishness, ill-temper, and bad manners. They’re 
all curable; but the divorce court won’t cure them, 
and it never has and never will. It’s this ‘passion’ 
talk that does the harm. What young people call 
passion for the most part is just an appetite. A 
chemical process, somebody called it. It ain’t 
love, though it can be the highest way of express¬ 
ing love. Love’s a thing that grows slowly and 


166 


NOBODY KNOWS 


has roots and can stand wind and weather. I 
believe to make a success of your love life is just 
about as difficult as to make a success of your art. 
In both you have to put in a deal of collar-work 
to get your good moments. But it’s the best thing 
there is, anyway, although it stands to reason that 
you has to pay the biggest price for it. There’s 
no getting something for nothing in this world, 
Gilbert. And often one pays heavily and gets 
only an ’eartache in return. That’s what you’ll 
do if you don’t take a pull at yourself and realise 
that you and this little Irish school-marm have 
both of you made a bloomer. If she hadn’t got 
new-fangled notions about emancipation she 
wouldn’t be here with you now. And see what a 
lot of trouble you’d both be saved! The old- 
fashioned way is the best, Gilbert. When I was 
young, when a girl gave her lips to the man who 
loved her, she gave everything. He knew where 
he was then, and so did she.” 

Cleopatra’s “record” came abruptly to an end, 
and Gilbert didn’t feel capable of winding her up 
again. It had been an unusually long record, 
even for her, but bits of it stuck in his mind, and 
he was grateful to her for helping him to clarify 
his own thoughts. For some minutes they sat in 
silence, listening to the plash and rumble of the 
waters, looking at the battered and coquettish 
Venus surrounded by her dolphins. Cleopatra 
seemed to be lost in contemplation—perhaps of her 
own past, perhaps of her future. For she 


NOBODY KNOWS 


167 . 


undoubtedly had a future. Mathers had whis¬ 
pered to him that she and Austin Dodge were 
going to be married in a fortnight. It had seemed 
a grotesque joke at the time, but somehow it did 
not seem quite so ridiculous now. After all, this 
gross, vulgar, unselfish old dear understood men. 
She knew their habits, their weaknesses. Cleo¬ 
patra’s secret was that she gave, gave all the time. 
She “did things,” did the prodigiously important 
minute things of which men have decided to think 
themselves incapable. She looked after clothes. 
She had money. Gilbert knew that she would be 
“upset” if Dodge got drunk, but that she would 
smile her pleased hospitable barmaid’s smile when¬ 
ever he drank enough to “feel happy in his inside.” 
That was it. She did not grudge her man any 
“happy feeling.” She was generous. And in 
her funny way, he guessed that she would contrive 
to give back to her brilliant, rather pathetic protege 
the success which once had been his. Gilbert could 
see her bearing up like some courageous cart¬ 
horse, under the yoke. She deserved to be happy 
because she had seen what most people were too 
blind to see—the decent side of Austin Dodge’s 
character. Gilbert did not like Dodge, but he 
was convinced that he would do the decent thing 
by Cleopatra. Bless her funny old heart—she 
knew what she was talking about. She had found 
romance! 

Cleopatra awoke from her reverie, put her 
large hand on Gilbert’s knee and smiled down at 


168 


NOBODY KNOWS 


him. “Come along, old dumps,” she said. “Let’s 
go back to the palace and have our tea. . . . And 
mind you give that little girl of yours the chance 
to give you the sack. Remember she’s made just 
as big a fool of herself as she has of you. Part 
friends, my dear.” 

Gilbert kissed her large capable hand. “You’re 
a wise old thing,” he said. “I can see that I 
shall have to adopt you.” 

“As a grandmother,” suggested Cleopatra. 
“Well, I’ll make a good one, dearie, even if me 
English ain’t quite what it ought to be!” 

While they were walking back down the green 
shaded pathway to the Villa, Gilbert felt suddenly 
as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his 
shoulders. His heart leapt; he was flooded with 
a queer unexpected sensation of happiness. Could 
it be true? Was he really free again, his own 
man, himself? He stretched out both his arms 
and laughed. 

Margery Vincent, the Wandervogel, came 
bounding towards them up the pathway. “We 
are all just dying for our teas,” she cried, “and 
do look at this. Isn’t it splendid?” She thrust 
a telegram into Cleopatra’s hand. 

“Anna has just brought it round from the 
pension,” she explained. 

While Cleopatra unfolded the telegram, Mar¬ 
gery told Gilbert that it was to say that her Mother 
was coming back to Florence in two days’ time. 
“Well, that’s a mercy!” Cleopatra exclaimed. 


NOBODY KNOWS 


169 


“You’ll be able to meet her,” she added, looking at 
Gilbert. With his eyes on her stepdaughter, 
Gilbert felt that the meeting would be pleasant. 
He found himself looking forward to it. 


CHAPTER XIX 


When, an hour later, Gilbert suggested to 
Moyra that they should go back to their hotel, he 
found that she had invited Mabel Watson and 
Margery Vincent to dine with them. “You don’t 
mind, Gilbert, do you?” she said. “Mabel Watson 
is an awfully interesting person, and you and 
Margery have made friends already. I saw you 
at lunch.” 

Gilbert did not mind. What he really would 
have liked to do was to dine alone with Louis 
Mathers or with Tobey. He longed to escape the 
feminine atmosphere. Three women to one man 
was not fair. But after all, what did it matter? 
They took a cab from the Ponte Rosso and drove to 
the Hotel Mazzini, to rest before dinner. Mabel 
and Margery Vincent were to join them at a small 
trattoria called the Nuova Toscana at half-past 
seven. As they rattled along Gilbert revolved in 
his head what he should say to Moyra. The whole 
thing was so absurd, so fantastic, so humiliating, 
for both of them. What did she expect him to do 
about it? What was her solution? His new 
found freedom and detachment had restored to him 
his affection for her and put him once more—but 
in a wholly different way—under the spell of her 
170 



NOBODY KNOWS 


171 


Irish charm. She looked curiously boyish as she 
sat upright in the cab and gazed up at the great 
stone palazzi with her round blue eyes, as if she 
could pierce all their secrets. Her odd pointed 
Russian cap seemed to give her a queer sexless 
quality. She really was a boy in her dream life, 
he suspected—a Renaissance page in scarlet trunk 
hose; a figure out of a story by Boccaccio. He 
could imagine her bearing a silver platter loaded 
with wine and fruit to some alone Princess. The 
Princess—was her name Neifile?—would have a 
musical instrument by the side of her couch—a 
what-do-you-call-it? — and Dioneo’s long fine 
fingers would stray across the strings. There in 
the artificial dusk of the Florentine afternoon 
Moyra-Dioneo would sing lightly about love and 
turn his round eyes upon the adored one, in amor¬ 
ous entreaty. It was all got out of books, of 
course. But the restricted school-marm that she 
was, in the world of reality, found an outlet that 
way. He couldn’t blame her. Dreams, dreams, 
dreams! To every man and woman, the dream 
life is sacred. He must “tread lightly” lest he 
tread on her dreams. Had he really gained any¬ 
thing, he wondered, by letting life impinge upon 
his own? 

At dinner, freckled, red-haired Mabel Watson, 
with her truculent eyes and her torrential gush of 
learning, relegated him to the position of “Herr 
Ober.” He was attentive, silent — save for an 
occasional remark to Margery, worked in edgewise 


172 


NOBODY KNOWS 


— but efficient in regard to the ordering of the 
meal. There were, it appeared from Mabel’s 
ecstatic talk, certain things at Bologna which 
Moyra must see. Mabel was going to Bologna as 
soon as Mrs. Vincent returned from Lucca. 
Couldn’t Moyra come too? She must come. 
Mabel knew a small and cheap hotel. She was 
ruthlessly insistent. Gilbert was aware that he 
did not exist, for either of them, though Moyra had 
the grace to feel embarrassed by the calm way in 
which Mabel ruled him out. “Why don’t you go,” 
he said to her—darting into the conversation. 
“You’d enjoy it.” Moyra looked at him and 
blushed painfully. She wanted to go, and she 
knew that he knew it. This made it all the more 
awkward. She hated having to hurt his feelings; 
and all that Mabel could get from her in the way 
of a promise was that she would think it over and 
tell her in the morning. 

After dinner they went to one of the Cafes in 
the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, for their coffee and 
liqueurs. The place was crowded. Out of the 
corner of his eye Gilbert could see Louis Mathers 
and Aubrey Sutton, and two or three other men, 
laughing at a distant table over a carafe of red 
wine. Mabel’s ecstatic art chatter made him want 
to slink off to them and talk bawdy, talk dogs and 
horses, talk scandal, politics — anything with guts 
in it. Astounding how these girls contrived to 
render nauseous one of the primal interests of his 
life! He felt as if he never wanted to look at a 


NOBODY KNOWS 


173 


picture again and remembered, gratefully, the 
spluttering manifestoes of Marinetti and the Italian 
Futurists. Faugh, these school-marms and their 
museums! His irritation was rising to fever point 
when suddenly Margery Vincent, who, in rapt 
absorption of the scene around her, had been pay¬ 
ing no attention to her companions’ chatter, 
exclaimed “Coo. What a lovely man!” 
Gilbert’s glance followed hers and rested, with 
equal admiration, on a peasant boy with dark eyes 
and olive skin who was playing a guitar in the 
square, beyond the fringe of chairs and tables. 
His velvet-black eyes and occasional quick smile 
were being employed with conscious art for pro¬ 
fessional purposes, but his body had a natural and 
unconscious grace which his rough clothes could 
not conceal. Every pose, every movement was a 
delight to watch, and the child who gazed at him 
was held spellbound. 

“How Mummy would love to see him without 
his clothes on,” she observed at last. 

There was silence. The blessed word “Cinque- 
cento” died away on Mabel’s lips. Her flood of 
conversation stopped dead. Gilbert smiled a 
saturine smile behind his cigarette. How these 
museum mummies really dreaded beauty! “Isn’t 
it getting rather late, darling?” Mabel drawled, 
looking up at Margery. “You’ll be awfully tired 
to-morrow, you know, if you sit up.” 

Margery looked at the usually reckless and 
exuberant Mabel in blank astonishment. So 


174 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Mabel was “grown up” and stuffy, too, under¬ 
neath her cameraderie. It was a bitter disappoint¬ 
ment. “Well, I like that,” she said, resentfully. 
“It isn’t eleven yet and look how many times I’ve 
waited up for you!” 

Gilbert saw his opportunity and interposed. 
“If Margery wants to go to bed,” he remarked, 
“I can see her home to the pension, if she’ll let 
me. You and Moyra will be all right here.” 

The suggestion was favourably received by all 
parties, including Margery, whose sharp instincts 
told her that men were in the world to be made 
use of, and that with Gilbert as a companion she 
need not go to bed until she chose. 

Margery marched Gilbert away, down the Via 
Tornabuoni, towards the river. “Is your Mother 
a sculptor?” Gilbert asked. 

“Oh, don’t you know,” said Margery, “she 
makes things called ‘figurines.’ They’re like 
Tanagra statuettes. I mean they’re about the same 
size. She made a lovely one of me that’s in one 
of the galleries at Miinchen. . . . Look! Egg- 
beaver!” cried the inconsequent child, seizing 
Gilbert’s arm. “Royal egg-beaver! That gives 
me a game.” 

Gilbert gazed in bewilderment into the Cafe 
before which Margery had halted him. “There 
he is,” she hissed. “Down there on the right, 
reading the Corriere della Sera." The person 
indicated had a bald and glistening head — and 
from his cheeks and chin grew an abundant red 


NOBODY KNOWS 


175 


beard. Margery now explained the mysteries of 
her favourite pastime. “And you score just as 
in lawn tennis,” she said. “But when you spot 
an egg and a beaver together, that counts two 
points, and when you see a Royal egg-beaver it 
gives you the game. The Royals are the red ones, 
you know. He’s a beauty, isn’t he!” She gazed 
with rapture at her find, just as a naturalist might 
gaze at a rare species of butterfly. 

“I think we’d better move or he won’t love 
us,” Gilbert suggested. The Royal egg-beaver had 
dropped his newspaper, and was turning upon both 
of them an inflamed and angry eye. 

They walked on down the crowded street, and 
Margery scored another three points. She was an 
expert. “I had a fearful disappointment the other 
day,” she remarked. “I was lunching with 
Mummy at the Park Hotel and I saw a whole herd. 
It was in the men’s lavatory. The door was half 
open, and I looked in by accident and saw at least 
seven, all adjusting their beavers before the look¬ 
ing-glass. One of them was a Royal, too! But 
Mummy wasn’t there at the time to play with, so 
it didn’t count.” 

Gilbert felt, not for the first time, a spasm 
of curiosity about “Mummy.” He must, he 
decided, make a point of meeting her. Through 
Margery he got reflections from her personality 
which intrigued him. Mrs. Vincent was not a 
crank, at all events. But, since — as he had 
gathered—she was the widow of a major in the 


176 


NOBODY KNOWS 


regular army who had been killed in 1915, she 
might be unbearably “social.” He hoped she was 
not a perfect lady, skilfully keeping up the appear¬ 
ances of old decency on a very limited income. 
Not but what a certain amount of old decency 
might not prove attractive after Cleopatra’s court 
of birth-controllers, unfired food experts, and 
what not. . . . 

They came now to the Arno, and stood for a 
moment looking over the parapet. The sky was 
unfathomable above them, its darkness mitigated 
by a faint unseizable light. It was a sky which 
seemed rather to draw them up into itself than to 
shut them in. “I wonder why on earth Omar 
called it an ‘inverted bowl,’ ” said Margery, as 
she gazed upwards at the flickering stars. “I 
wouldn’t call that the lid of a soup tureen, would 
you?” 

But Gilbert did not feel talkative. The night, 
and the star-reflecting waters of the river had filled 
his brain with memories. And memories, when 
we are not so young as we were and cannot yet 
admit to middle age, are apt to be disconcerting 
things. “Why was I never told,” he quoted, 
“that the heart grows old!” 

He looked at the Wandervogel striding along 
by his side, and smiled at her. It was perhaps the 
first time in his life that he had ever looked at a 
child with parental tenderness. He was beginning 
to grasp, at last, the significance of the fast 
approaching forties! 


NOBODY KNOWS 


177 


The girl, with a quick instinct of sympathy, 
linked her arm in his, and without talking again 
they walked on to the pension on the Lung’ Arno 
Amerigo Vespucci. “Good night, queer man!” 
said Margery, when Gilbert had rung the bell for 
her. 

“Good night, Wandervogel!” 

The door opened and closed, and Gilbert turned 
back along the river and walked slowly to the 
Pont Vecchio, a prey to miserable reflection for 
which he could find no excuse save self-indulgence. 
He wondered how Chloe and George were getting 
on together, and what would happen to his son — 
his child and Chloe’s, the child whom his selfish 
poverty and Chloe’s selfish passions had left with¬ 
out a home. As members of the commonwealth, 
he and Chloe, it seemed to him then, had done a 
great wrong. They were both equally to blame. 
It was six of one and half a dozen of the other. 
But there was no real excuse for either of them. 
Chloe had gained her thrill; and he had gained 
his freedom. He was no longer the jaded tram- 
horse, dragging along the back-breaking load of 
a wife and family. He was a free man. But 
might not the unfortunate Gillie have to pay for 
it? And if he had to pay, would he ever forgive 
either of them? 

Gilbert’s thoughts went back to his own child¬ 
hood, to his mother and father, conventional 
middle-class Victorians living in a stuffy vicarage 
in a south London suburb. Probably they fell 


178 


NOBODY KNOWS 


from their own standards, and perhaps they had 
their moments of acute misery under the marital 
yoke. But at least they knew where they were. 
They had their code: and they had managed to 
stick out the difficult years so that in his boyhood 
and during his schooldays, and until his father 
and mother were both dead, he had possessed a 
home, a home that went on, a home where there 
were always meals at regular hours — meals that 
seemed to appear by a process as natural as the 
coming of night and day. He realised now how 
much this comfortable, if uninspiring background 
had meant to him, what a protection it had been, 
how much it had contributed to his self-confidence. 
No doubt the old system had grave defects. But 
it was, at least, a system, and one which rendered 
necessary the virtues of discipline and self-control. 
What was there to take its place? Sex-talk, birth- 
control, sham science, social chaos, and — per¬ 
haps— the liberation of the individual! For 
what were they heading? But no. People always 
became pessimistic when the years began to tell on 
them! The new generation, after all, was repre¬ 
sented by the Wandervogels and not by the Kate 
Crockers. The children would find their own way 
out all right. No need to worry about them. It 
was the men and women of his own age — adrift 
between two periods — who must inevitably have 
the rough crossing. The safest plan, for the artist 
at all events, was to cut out marriage altogether, to 
reduce sex to its lowest common factor, to become 


NOBODY KNOWS 


179 


a spiritual beaver and defy the feminine lust to 
clip and tidy! The safest, perhaps, but not the 
easiest. “Nature,” he reflected, “has a nasty 
way of keeping trump cards up her sleeve.” 


CHAPTER XX 

‘Then you’ll go straight home from Bologna?” 
Gilbert asked. 

It was the morning of Moyra’s departure. She 
was in pyjamas, bending over her half-filled suit¬ 
case, while Gilbert sat on the edge of the bed, 
smoking and watching her pack. 

“I think I’d better, my dear,” she replied. 
She did not look around at him, but he could see 
that her face and neck were flushing. “I told 
you I should be a disappointment, didn’t I? Do 
you remember, when you drove me home after the 
Beggar’s Opera? But I don’t think I knew then 
how true it was.” 

She came and sat by his side, and put her arm 
caressingly round him. Kisses came easily to 
her, and even now she failed to realise the effect 
on Gilbert of her facile amativeness. She put her 
head on his shoulder and her loose hair touched 
his cheek. 

“I’m afraid I’ve cheated you . . . and I 
didn’t mean to.” 

“I wonder if you can possibly have cheated 
yourself?” Gilbert asked. 

“I don’t think so. I am nearly thirty. I 
really ought to know my own nature by this time. 

180 


NOBODY KNOWS 


181 


I’ve cared for you more than for any other man 
I’ve ever met. But I’ve nothing to give you that 
you really want. Physical things . . . ugh! I 
hate that side of life.” 

Gilbert wondered, bitterly, what she supposed 
her arms and lips were if they were not 
“physical.” “We live in a queer unnatural 
world,” he said. 

“Perhaps I’m a queer unnatural woman,” 
Moyra replied. “But there are many like me. 
My work is everything, and the girls I lecture to 
mean very much more to me than any man could 
ever mean. And I hate children and don’t want 
a child. I realise now how rottenly I’ve treated 
you. I ought not to have come away with you. 
It wasn’t fair. . . .” 

Gilbert kissed her tenderly. “You’ve given me 
a great deal,” he said. “But I’m afraid you are 
married to your books, dear, and my love for 
you has seemed a kind of adultery. We can’t 
help the way we are made. If you married 
me, I can see now I should only make you 
unhappy.” 

“And I you.” 

“Yes.” 

“Well, we can at least be thankful that we’ve 
found it out in time . . . and been honest. Our 
friendship remains, Gilbert, doesn’t it?” 

“Yes. We’ve rescued that from the ruins, at 
all events.” 

Moyra got up and stood by the window. A 


182 


NOBODY KNOWS 


shaft of sunshine fell on her hair, making the 
strands of gold among the brown shine and 
sparkle. She looked very small, almost elfin in 
her mauve silk pyjamas, and Gilbert’s old hunger 
to possess her gnawed him afresh. It wasn’t to 
be borne! She had no right to her beauty, no 
right to harass a man like this, to stir up 
the healthy normal appetites which she wouldn’t 
gratify. She couldn’t be such a fool as not to 
know what she was doing! Oh, well, she was 
leaving him, anyhow. In two hours’ time she 
would be on her way, and the chapter ended. 

He got up quickly from the bed and went 
through the communicating door into his own 
room. . . . 

What Gilbert found most difficult to tolerate 
in Moyra was her assumption of moral superiority. 
What he could only regard as an unfortunate 
pathological condition which psycho-analysis, if 
it were really any good, ought to be able to 
remedy, she exalted as a sign of her superlative 
purity and refinement. On their way to the 
station, Moyra became passionate in her denuncia¬ 
tion of what she called the “physical side of life,” 
and dithyrambic about “Beauty” and about 
“Art,” which she assumed to be exclusively 
spiritual. 

Gilbert just simply “wished she wouldn’t.” 
He did not want to start an argument, and he did 
not want her to leave him with, so to speak, a bad 
taste in his mouth. There were so many aspects 


NOBODY KNOWS 


183 


of her nature which he loved — why must she 
show him now the one which he had most reason 
to detest? 

“I don’t care what you say,” he burst out, at 
last, “but you’ll never persuade me that men and 
women who starve the flesh and deny it and 
revile it don’t starve the soul as well. . . . 

Don’t you remember how Nietzsche says some¬ 
where that he couldn’t imagine a God that didn’t 
dance? Everything dances — the great rhythmic 
dance of the universe. Everything that’s alive 
dances. But you hate dancing. You cant dance! 
You’re a dead thing that can’t dance. And you’re 
going away with another dead thing that can’t 
dance, to stare at the Beauty left behind them by 
men who could. And you think you’ll get some¬ 
thing from it. You won’t. Not really. You 
can’t, because you cant dance! You hate ‘the 
physical side of life’ because you aren’t truly 
alive. If you were you’d know that soul and body, 
while we have breath, are indivisible.” 

“And isn’t it you that’s the quarrelsome man 
now!” said Moyra, become ultra-feminine in a 
moment. His violence had brought out in her the 
coquette, the Irish charmer with the seductive voice 
to whom, when they first met, he had so 
easily fallen a victim. The octopus, with its 
tentacles! “Well, I’m damned!” thought Gilbert. 
“Women really are the devil!” But the tentacles 
had got their grip on him, and the weather 
changed. They were both laughing heartily 


184 


NOBODY KNOWS 


when they arrived at the station and found Mabel 
Watson waiting for them. 

“Hullo!” said Mabel, with her usual trucul¬ 
ence. “I got your ticket for you to save you 
waiting in the queue. There’s nearly forty 
minutes before the train is due to start, and it 
will probably be late, but you know what a curse 
railway travelling is in this country! It’s no good 
leaving anything to chance. Mrs. Vincent missed 
her train coming from Lucca, and was hours late. 
Margery and I were in a fearful stew about 
her!” 

Gilbert went to the bookstall and bought Moyra 
the Continental Daily Mail and himself a packet of 
Macedonia cigarettes. He was impatient to be 
gone. Indeed neither of them could conceal from 
the other an eagerness to get the parting over. 
Moyra, now that she was with Mabel, had become 
suddenly a different person. She had more poise 
and assurance, was more profoundly at ease than 
she had ever been in Gilbert’s company. She 
laughed and chattered as if a weight had been 
lifted from her mind. Gilbert watched the two 
girls together, for a few moments, and it was a 
revelation to him — or rather a confirmation of 
what he already knew. To men Moyra was a 
coquette and little else, to other women a potential 
friend. He wondered whether Chloe had really 
understood her. . . . 

“I say, don’t you bother to wait to see us off, 
Gilbert,” Moyra remarked, when he rejoined her. 


NOBODY KNOWS 


185 


“Our suit-cases are quite light, and in any case 
there are plenty of porters.” 

Gilbert offered his hand to Miss Watson, who 
held it absent-mindedly. Moyra kissed him as if 
he were a very little boy, and he half expected her 
to give him a pat on the back and a bar of choco¬ 
late as well. He wished the two girls bon voyage , 
and strolled out of the station—free! He had 
broken out of one more prison; and when he 
explored his own sensations he found himself not 
so badly hurt as he had expected. In any case, the 
hurts were nothing in comparison with the joy of 
his escape from bondage. He walked on in the 
bright April sunshine and found himself looking at 
the familiar city as if for the first time. He had no 
one’s whims to consult now except his own. He 
could hoard his appreciations, like a miser. 

When he came to the Duomo, he went in and 
tiptoed across its dark cavernous expanses to have 
a look at the Della Robbias—a secret debauch of 
“sight-seeing.” The place was crowded with little 
groups of men and women carrying Baedekers. 
Guides pointed, and shouted hoarsely, and earnest 
women turned jaded eyes at the indicated object. 
It was amusing, in a depressing sort of way. To 
think that for every visitor who enjoyed Florence 
there must be at least two who endured it from a 
sense of duty! 

Suddenly Gilbert’s attention was caught by a 
group of people who entered the Duomo in a com¬ 
pact body. They seemed to be pushing in front 


186 


NOBODY KNOWS 


of them a young man who was in the last stages of 
fatigue. Something about both the young man and 
his party seemed vaguely familiar. Gilbert walked 
across the cathedral in their direction, and at last 
recognised them. It was Burns and his select ladies 
and gentlemen! Captain Tupp’s white spats were 
unmistakable. And as usual Mrs. Valentine was 
straying from her own party and getting mixed up 
with another. There they all were. Burns had— 
heaven knew how!—brought them back intact from 
Naples. It was a marvel. 

Gilbert shook his friend warmly by the hand. 
“The party,” in its usual condition of despair, 
began to surge round him. Mrs. Masters, in par¬ 
ticular, seemed to have a secret trouble which she 
wanted to unload upon someone—upon anyone 
who was not Mr. Burns. They looked ruthless and 
insatiable. How they wanted to ask questions! 
How tired and bored they all were! 

Gilbert’s heart bled for Burns, but he felt that 
he would only add to the conductor’s difficulties 
by lingering. “Can you get out to-night?” he 
whispered. Burns nodded. “Then meet me at 
Nardini’s at half-past eight,” he said. 

“Thank God!” said Burns, with a wan smile. 
“I’ll be there all right.” 


CHAPTER XXI 


Gilbert lunched at the Villa Flora, in the hope 
of meeting the Wandervogel and her mysterious 
mother, but to his disappointment they were not 
there, and Cleopatra did not mention them. The 
only other guests besides himself were Tobey 
Walker and Betty Carson. They looked the picture 
of misery. Tobey was bored and jaded, and Betty 
evidently irritable and dissatisfied. She was a tall, 
bony girl with a long, pointed nose, fine dark eyes, 
and an untidy mop of black hair. Her complexion 
was sallow: she looked vaguely unhealthy. She 
was dressed, apparently, in “lengths” of “art” cur¬ 
tain fabric. Her frock was an “art green” curtain 
and over it she wore an “art” terra-cotta cloak. 
Gilbert thought—probably because he had not 
entirely outgrown the gout du tablier of his adoles¬ 
cence—that she would have been much more effec¬ 
tive in the uniform of a parlourmaid. Art women 
appalled him: he sighed secretly for crinolines. 

Cleopatra was extremely solicitous on his be¬ 
half throughout luncheon, her eyes swimming with 
unshed tears. “You poor boy, your heart is aching, 
I know it,” she seemed to be saying to him. But 
it wasn’t, really. He was enjoying his food, admir¬ 
ing Dodge’s taste in wine, looking with delight at 
187 


188 


NOBODY KNOWS 


the sunny garden, thinking of his new novel, con¬ 
templating a volume of essays, congratulating him¬ 
self on his appointment with Burns, following 
amusing trains of thought, recreating himself. He 
had buried the corpse of his abortive love-affair 
and had no tears left to shed over the grave. In 
the hope (as she supposed) of distracting him from 
any suicidal inclinations from which he might be 
suffering, Cleopatra took Tobey aside when the 
meal was over and urged him to spend the day 
with “poor Gilbert.” “I’ll look after Betty for 
you,” she said. 

Tobey’s face lit up at the suggestion. He 
heaved a sigh of sheer thankfulness. A day’s 
escape! It was a wonderful thought. He raced 
across the garden to where Gilbert was sitting with 
Austin Dodge, and begged him to come out and 
“explore.” The moment they were safely outside 
the gates of the Villa Flora, Tobey’s high spirits 
began to return to him. “Cleopatra’s a great 
dear,” he said, “but I’m getting rather restive. I 
want mountains and a piano. I don’t think 
I shall stay much longer. I shall take Betty back 
to London and then go North for the winter—or 
perhaps I shall go to Germany, or to Ireland. Italy 
doesn’t suit me. It’s too hot and dusty, and I don’t 
like pictures or architecture. There isn’t enough 
green about. I must have a green country, with 
mists and rain. I like to get wet through and 
muddy, and then to come home and sit by a fire 
and take my boots off and eat a large tea. I think 


NOBODY KNOWS 


189 


my great-grandfather must have been a Scotch 
peasant. I understand peasants in mountainy 
places, and like them—but not the Latin kind. I 
hate all this oil and macaroni and dark flashing 
eyes and olive skins, and the hard blue sky, and 
Verdi, bel canto , popery, passion—and all that.” 
He waved his arm to include the whole of the 
Florentine “stage.” A passing cab-driver, startled 
from sleep by his gesture, pulled up by the side 
of the pavement. 

“I always knew you were a Protestant at 
heart,” said Gilbert, laughing, as they settled 
themselves in the cab. “That is why you have 
been forced to invent a philosophy of life to justify 
you in following your inclinations. That’s the 
Protestant mind, my boy. Hatred of auricular con¬ 
fession is at the bottom of it. The Catholic is much 
more practical. He enjoys himself, pays for it, 
and then enjoys himself again with a light heart, 
maintaining all the while the most courteous rela¬ 
tions with Almighty God, thanks to the charming 
affability of the saints. It’s all ever so much 
simpler. But you, you are just like George May¬ 
nard Brown. You are always adjusting yourself 
to your Nonconformist conscience, and trying to 
make yourself feel that what you do is right be¬ 
cause you do it.” 

“Duomo!” growled the cabby, pointing with 
his whip at the most easily identifiable of all the 
Florentine sights. “Oh, go on!” cried Tobey. 
“Forward. Avanti! Get along with it.” The 


190 


NOBODY KNOWS 


cabby shrugged his shoulders, and whipped up the 
horse, and they began once again to rattle slowly 
over the granite setts. Gilbert loved cabs. He 
liked to take his afternoon nap in them, and could 
never get over the sense of well-being which—after 
so many years of poverty—a cab drive invariably 
gave him. 

“Oooh!” said Tobey, hugging himself with 
emotion. “I like that. Nonconformist conscience 
indeed. At least I’m not a religious reactionary 
like you. You used to call yourself a Bolshevist 
and go into dithers about the bally old ‘Dawn’ and 
all the rest of it, and rush about calling everybody 
comrade. How well I remember you in 1919!” 

“Now, Tobey! It’s tactless to discuss a dead 
grande passion 

“I know, and I’m sorry if it smarts. All the 
same, you know, you did go completely off the rails 
about your smelly ‘comrades’ and the brotherhood 
of man and the rising of the red sun and so on, 
and that was just your religious emotionalism. You 
don’t really believe in progress a bit. You got 
caught by catch phrases, but you never got down 
to brass tacks, or thought how you could free your¬ 
self and your own circle from the fetters of con¬ 
vention. That’s the difference between us. I’ve 
got a social conscience, if you like. I’ve got 
a practical job, and I do it. I believe in the 
future. I suppose, from your Bolsh standpoint, 
you’d sneer at me as a ‘reformist.’ ” 

Gilbert laughed. “I’ll admit you are a martyr 


NOBODY KNOWS 


191 


to your convictions, my dear Tobey,” he rejoined. 
“I never said you weren’t. From my point of 
view, to change one’s mistress every three months 
would be as boring and as nerve-racking as having 
to get a new flat once a quarter. The art of life 
demands a reasonably long lease in both particu¬ 
lars. . . . I’ll even admit that in some cases the 
repressed young things whom you make it your 
business to liberate, from the noblest of motives, 
gain a good deal from your educational activities. 
But what I don’t see is where you come in. 
Frankly, I don’t much like being myself, but I’d 
like still less to be you.” 

“I can stand on my own feet. You can’t.” 

“In a way, I suppose that’s true,” Gilbert 
admitted. “But in another way, it isn’t true.” 

“You go in off the deep end such a lot,” said 
Tobey, pursuing his advantage. 

“But, then, you see, I like the deep end. I’ve 
learnt how to swim.” 

“Swimmers have the worst time when they’re 
drowning, you know.” 

“Oh, come on, let’s go and have tea, old thing,” 
said Gilbert, laughing. “The world’s in a muddle. 
There’s nothing left to believe in, and no way out. 
If we want salvation we shall have to go to the East 
to look for it. The West is finished. We have no 
Gandhi. We haven’t even a Mustapha Kemal! 
The virtue is gone out of us. Let us eat and 
drink.” 

They told the cabby to go to Gilli’s, and on 


192 


NOBODY KNOWS 


the way to the famous pasticceria , discussed the 
approaching marriage of Cleopatra and Austin 
Dodge. Here again their views diverged, because 
to Tobey the very word “marriage” was like a red 
rag to a bull. He thought Cleopatra ridiculous, 
and Dodge a mercenary knave. But Gilbert insisted 
that they were well matched, that Dodge’s contri¬ 
bution of intelligence and position was a fair 
equivalent to Cleopatra’s money, and that the 
marriage ought to be a great success for both of 
them. 

Later on, at Nardini’s, where they dined, they 
were joined by Louis Mathers and Aubrey Sutton. 
When they had finished eating they sat at a table 
in the street outside, and ordered more Chianti. 
Tobey, waxing eloquent over his wine, held forth 
once again upon his mission. He inveighed par¬ 
ticularly against “vice hounds,” and talked psycho¬ 
analysis to prove that the journalists and publicists 
who denounced the immorality of reformers and 
got modern novels burnt by the police were them¬ 
selves obviously addicted to the most shameful 
secret vices. “They can’t stand daylight in their 
dark cupboards, these people,” Tobey exclaimed, 
“and that’s why they hate us. They gloat over 
4 sin’ because they really love it. They want secrecy 
and suppression, what they call ‘reticence,’ in order 
not to lose their delicious private thrills. But the 
new generation is doing away with all that. They 
really do believe that human love is a sacred thing, 
and that all the details concerning it ought to be as 


NOBODY KNOWS 


193 


sweet and open as the sunshine. They bathe naked 
in the sea, whenever the police will let them. They 
aren’t ashamed of their bodies, unless they are 
very ugly, and they aren’t ashamed of their in¬ 
stincts. They want to make life more beautiful 
than it ever has been during the Christian era. 
They may make all kinds of mistakes, but at least 
they won’t be furtive. That’s why dirty, drunken 
journalists, who made money by urging others to 
go and get shot in their stupid war, are so fond of 
denouncing them in the Sunday papers at ten 
guineas a column. They can’t stand youth, those 
people. The war proved it.” 

Tobey might have gone on indefinitely, had he 
not been conscious that his audience was a little 
out of sympathy, and had he not remembered that 
Cleopatra had invited to dinner the two attractive 
English girls whom she had picked up the other 
day at Fiesole. Aubrey Sutton had watched him, 
while he talked with a veiled smile. A gentle 
malice lurked at the back of his dark eyes. Some¬ 
times his manicured hand had tapped the table; 
but not impatiently. Mathers, taking deep draughts 
from his carafe, had wondered with quite a spasm 
of interest whereabouts in his foggy native island 
the young things bathed sans maillot. When 
Maurice Burns emerged from the darkness into 
the circle of light round their table, Tobey excused 
himself, and strode off towards the Villa Flora. 

“I like those strenuous open-air types who wear 
old clothes and tennis-shirts and no hats,” said 


194 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Mathers. “Let us meet him again, Gilbert. Clever 
ways with the women, those chaps have.” 

“Women, I must have women,” Maurice Burns 
misquoted. “There’s nothing relaxes the mind 
like them! I can tell you,” he said, turning to 
Gilbert, “that my mind needs relaxing. Thank 
the Lord, I’ve only another ten days of the party. 
Got to take ’em to Venice on Tuesday. Then we 
go back to Milan and they skedaddle home by 
themselves. Blast them.” 

“Have some wine,” said Mathers, calling a 
smiling boy in knickerbockers and ordering two 
more litres. “It’s better again to-night. It has 
been bad recently, very bad.” 

Gilbert explained that his friend was reacting 
against his party of selected ladies and gentle¬ 
men. 

“I expect he feels a desire for some kind of 
excess,” said Aubrey Sutton in his delicate drawl. 

“Ha, a problem!” Mathers exclaimed. “Shall 
he slop over emotionally—in which case I can send 
him to call upon an attractive young woman to 
whose eyes he may compose sonnets, and upon 
whose bosom he may, after three days’ intensive 
courtship, possibly be permitted to recline? Or 
shall he, with less expenditure of time and money, 
visit the Troll King’s daughters and have done 
with it?” 

“Personally, I can’t see how one could do 
either,” Aubrey replied, dropping his monocle and 
sipping his rough wine as if it were Chateau 


NOBODY KNOWS 


195 


d’Yquem. “One gets a certain macabre effect in 
the via delle Belle Donne, I admit. It’s all very 
well for schoolboys who have read a little Mau¬ 
passant. But quite, quite crude. As for the 
other business!” He laughed, shrugged his shoul¬ 
ders, and laid a thin reproving hand on Bums’ 
knee. 

“Aubrey is right,” said Mathers. “All that 
sort of thing is a shade too operatic for the man 
of taste. Too much the Teuton’s notion of Italy. 
Lyrical stallion serenading! Tenor e robusto 
sweating profusely. Flash of dark eyes, clammy 
embrace, song of triumph, snore of satisfaction! 
Wouldn’t do for you, my boy. . . . Not that I 
dislike women myself,” Mathers went on. “On 
the contrary, I’d do a lot for a charming woman. 
I married several, you know, when I was your 
age. . . . But one ought to take women in small 
doses when one grows old. Poor dear Gilbert is, 
of course, a sentimental monogamist. He wouldn’t 
agree with me. Fatal thing, sentiment.” 

Mathers squared his shoulders and threw back 
his head with its horns of grey hair, in a gesture 
of defiance or of triumph. The wine had mel¬ 
lowed him and he was forgetful of to-morrow’s 
gout. But was he really quite so triumphant as 
all that? “When you find his sore spot,” Gilbert 
reflected, “you find the man himself. And it is 
just our sorest spot that we take the greatest pains 
to conceal. What is Louis’, I wonder?” 

But if his self-sufficiency was a pose, it was 


196 


NOBODY KNOWS 


one which had become second nature to Mathers. 
He had taught himself to believe in it, and his 
humorous enjoyment of the Italian scene had 
helped him. 

“What a night!” said Burns, looking up 
dreamily at the stars. “Who could help being 
sentimental! Even the air is like a kiss.” 

“ Caresse aerienne /” crooned Sutton, who had 
never really got much beyond the ’nineties. He 
quoted the lines of which Burns’ remark had 
reminded him: 

“ ‘Premiers soirs de printemps: tendresse inavouee . . . 

Aux tiedeurs de la brise echarpe denouee . . . 

Caresse aerienne. . . . Encens mysterieux . . . 

Urne qu’une main d’ange incline au bord des cieux . . . 

Oh! quel desir ainsi, troublant le fond des ames, 

Met ce pli de langueur a la hanche des femmes?’ 

Gallic sentiment has its practical side, I suppose. 
All the same, they do know how to do it.” He 
went on quoting: 

“ ‘Premiers soirs de printemps: brises, legeres fievres! 

Douceur des yeux! . . . Tiedeur des mains! . . . Langueui 
des levres. 

Et l’Amour, une rose a la bouche, laissant 
Trainer a terre un peu de son manteau glissant, 

Nonchalamment s’accoude au parapet du fleuve, 

Et puisant au carquois d’or une fleche neuve, 

De ses beaux yeux voiles, cruel adolescent, 

Sourit, silencieux, a la Nuit qui consent.’ ” 

“Oh, chuck it, Aubrey,” said Mathers. “It 
reminds me of Massenet. Douceur des yeux! 

. . . Tiedeur des mains! . . . Langeur des 
levres! Heavens, it’s enough to make a healthy 


NOBODY KNOWS 


197 


man vomit. And the French mind thinks that 
that is poetry! Incredible. Let’s walk it off.” 

They paid their bills and strolled down the 
street into the Piazza della Signoria, now almost 
deserted. They were all a little drunk. Aubrey, 
unusually talkative, began to whisper to Louis 
Mathers about getting some “snow.” He “knew 
a place.” Mathers merely shrugged his shoulders. 
The great nude statues opposite the Uffizi looked 
cold and unearthly in the moonlight. “Come, 
David, you’re getting a big boy now!” said Louis, 
putting his hat chastely over David’s nakedness. 
A caped policeman, standing motionless in the 
shadow of the Loggia dei Lanzi, eyed him un¬ 
heeding. 

When they reached the Arno, Aubrey Sutton 
and Mathers drew together instinctively and 
walked ahead, leaving Burns and Gilbert to their 
less recondite consolations. “I wonder where 
they are off to,” Burns remarked. Gilbert de¬ 
clined to hazard a guess. “Never inquire about 
another man’s drug,” he suggested. 

“What’s the point of all this drug business— 
cocaine, heroin and all the rest of it?” 

“Escape through illusion. Forgetfulness. 
To be drunken. We all need it, and long for it,” 
Gilbert replied. “The difference is that you and 
I are content with wine—and dreams.” 

“I understand the need for escape,” said 
Bums. “But one wants a bit of ground to stand 
on, even more.” 


198 


NOBODY KNOWS 


“Yes. An anchorage — with a fairly long 
chain.” 

“After all, one must drop back to one’s 
starting-point. One ought to have, in every sense 
of the phrase, a pied a terre!” 

“Only self-love can give you that.” Gilbert 
laughed harshly. 

“Or the real grande passion —if it exists. In 
other words, selfless love.” 

Burns was trembling a little and Gilbert also 
suddenly shivered. They paused near Orioli’s 
book shop, and resting their elbows on the para¬ 
pet, looked down at the river. The delicate arm 
which rose from a black boat and supported a 
fishing-net cut the dark luminance of the sky like 
a sharply-outlined question mark. The stillness 
was unearthly. 

“I suppose it’s our own fault,” Burns said. 
“We’re in the middle of the everlasting sex war, 
and the women are winning. Men are naturally 
polygamous. They always have been and always 
will be. And women have discarded loyalty in 
consequence.” 

There was silence for a moment. “Yes, but 
men haven’t,” said Gilbert, in a voice that hardly 
rose above a whisper. His heart was beating 
painfully, and his face flushed in the darkness, so 
great was his emotion. 

“I believe that’s true, Gilbert,” Maurice 
answered. “Thank God, if it is.” 

They walked on for some time, without talking, 


NOBODY KNOWS 


199 


turning instinctively towards the heart of the 
city, to hide their embarrassment in some crowded 
cafe. 

An hour later Burns said good-bye to Gilbert. 
He would not, he said, be able to escape again 
from his party before his departure for Venice. 
They exchanged addresses and agreed to meet in 
London, in a few weeks’ time. 


CHAPTER XXII 


After Bums’ departure, Gilbert felt a sudden 
home-sickness for London, and his presence also 
was required there by his publisher, and by the 
man who was collaborating with him in turning 
his novel, “The Silent Stranger,” into a play. 
It was astonishing, after so many lean years to 
discover how a success succeeded! With the pub¬ 
lication of that wretched book, money seemed to 
pour in upon him from the most unlikely quarters, 
and had he been in financial difficulties, any 
publisher would now have been willing to pay him 
a substantial cheque on the signing of a contract. 
The number of copies sold of his book, in the 
United States, seemed fabulous — fifty-nine thou¬ 
sand! In Great Britain, and the Colonies, count¬ 
ing the cheap editions, the sales had already 
exceeded thirty thousand. His agents had just 
paid three thousand pounds into his bank, and 
there would be more to come. The negotiations 
for the sale of the option on the play were now (so 
it appeared from his collaborator’s letter) on the 
point of completion. And Who’s Who, repent¬ 
ing of its past neglect, had invited him to confide 
to a curious public the secrets of his birth and 
parentage, career, and recreations. 

200 


NOBODY KNOWS 


201 


All this material success was, in a way, fright¬ 
ening. When he had been unable to gratify any 
single one of his desires and ambitions he had 
always known precisely what he wanted to do. At 
the time when he was unable to pay the rent of 
his Earl’s Court tenement, he had discovered the 
perfect, the supremely desirable small house for 
sale in Holland Street, Kensington. He might go 
home and buy that house now, if it were still in 
the market. But he no longer needed it. He 
recalled also how once, when on a holiday with 
Chloe in Sussex, he had come across an old red¬ 
brick cottage, in a hollow of the downs, about 
a mile from the coast. It was to let, and the rent 
was ridiculous — twelve pounds a year. But they 
hadn’t had the money to take it and furnish it. How 
often had they “gone over” that enchanting place, 
the cottage of their dreams, and filled the long low 
rooms with imaginary chairs and settles! Gilbert 
could never get the memory of the lovely old house 
out of his mind. It haunted him. And now all he 
had to do was to take the next train back to 
England, to rush down to Sussex, and try to 
secure it. There was nothing to prevent him. The 
money was in his bank. And when he had spent 
what was there, more must inevitably come to him. 
He wasn’t in the slightest danger of starvation, 
and he had no dependents except Gillie, for whose 
education he had already provided. He was free 
to please himself. It was a delicious thought, 
but not without its spice of bitterness. His sudden 


202 


NOBODY KNOWS 


prosperity had made him feel more than ever 
homeless — the odd man out. He decided to go 
back to London in a few days’ time and look 
for a really comfortable flat. Then, perhaps, 
when he had furnished it to his liking and settled 
himself in it, he would go abroad again in the 
spring, if he could get Maurice Burns to accom¬ 
pany him. 

With these plans in his head, he called one 
afternoon at the Villa Flora, to say good-bye to 
his friends. As he neared the house he saw that 
the loggias were crowded with people. Cleopatra 
had evidently been giving a tremendous luncheon 
party. He had a sudden attack of nerves at the 
prospect of meeting a number of strangers — this 
was a disease from which he had suffered at 
intervals all his life, and it was a point of honour 
with him never to give way to it. Instead of 
slinking away, therefore, among the trees and 
making his escape unnoticed, he walked on until 
he was recognised, hailed and brought into the 
house by Austin Dodge. Most of the new faces 
made no impression on him whatever. But there 
was one which he instantly recognised, though he 
could not for the life of him recall where he had 
seen it before. But those dark blue eyes, that 
small laughing mouth and the narrow, very 
slightly Roman nose with finely cut nostrils were 
curiously familiar, and instinct told him that be¬ 
fore his life ended they were going to be more 
familiar still. Fie felt certain, too, that she was 


NOBODY KNOWS 


203 


the Wandervogel’s stepmother. It was not a case 
of “love at first sight.” He was not struck dumb 
with admiration of this woman, nor swept off his 
feet by her. The emotion he felt was comparable 
to what he might have been expected to feel had 
he, after an interval of twenty or thirty years, 
suddenly encountered a sister. His recognition of 
this face was in his subconscious memory. 

While his brain was occupied with impressions 
about this woman, who had probably scarcely 
noticed him and was sitting too far off for Cleo¬ 
patra to effect an introduction, Gilbert heard him¬ 
self chattering in an animated way about his 
intention to leave Florence, about his dinner with 
Tobey, and Louis Mathers, and Sutton, about 
Maurice Burns and his comic tourists. Cleopatra 
covered him with reproaches for going away so 
soon, and begged him to take up his quarters at 
the Villa. She was going to give a dance, she 
said, “to celebrate an important occasion.” This 
last was in a whisper; and Gilbert realised that he 
was supposed to be unable to guess the nature of 
the “important occasion.” Her approaching 
marriage was the deepest of deep secrets! Cleo¬ 
patra, bless her heart, was getting the last ounce 
of excitement out of her romance. But not even 
the prospect of seeing Cleopatra reappearing, 
radiantly, before all her friends as Mrs. Austin 
Dodge made Gilbert change his plans. Now that 
he had decided to go, he was impatient to be away 
— he was really almost gone. He had that feeling 


204 


NOBODY KNOWS 


which comes over one towards the end of a holiday 
of being already on the way back. Part of him 
had gone ahead, to London. 

He was wondering how soon the inevitable 
would happen, and he would find himself sitting 
next to the woman whose face had so disturbed 
him, and who was now involved in a conversation 
with the redoubtable Miss Kate Crocker, when the 
Wandervogel made one of her surprising entries. 
Nobody inquired where she had been, but there 
was a faint soupgon of tomato about her upper 
lip, which suggested a secret visit to the kitchen, 
and exercises in conversational Italian with the 
cook. The Wandervogel was known to have a 
criminal lust for tomatoes! She stood for a 
moment swinging her straw hat by its gentian blue 
ribbon, when she suddenly noticed Gilbert and 
bore down on him. 

“Hullo,” she said, “we haven’t seen you for 
days! I told Mummy you knew how to play 
beavers, and she got awfully excited. Do come 
and tell her about the Royal-egg we saw in the 
Cafe.” She put out a small, cool hand and 
dragged him to his feet. 

Cleopatra beamed. “Take Gilbert over to 
Mrs. Vincent, dearie,” she said. “He hasn’t been 
introduced yet.” 

The Wandervogel took him; and in a moment 
Gilbert found himself at the far end of the loggia 
shaking hands with the woman whose face he 
had recognised. Margery disappeared to find 


NOBODY KNOWS 


205 


cushions, but Miss Kate Crocker, remembering an 
appointment with a lady in dire need of instruction 
on the subject of "birth-control, rose from her chair 
and said good-bye effusively to Mrs. Vincent. “I 
just have enjoyed our talk,” she said. Mrs. Vin¬ 
cent smiled charmingly. 

Gilbert ensconced himself in the empty chair 
(though he hated chairs already warmed for him), 
and Margery, returning at that moment, sat at his 
feet on both the cushions. 

Gilbert found Josephine Vincent’s conversation 
easy and interesting, and curiously different in 
tone from that of any other members of Cleo¬ 
patra’s circle. Her humour was spontaneous, con¬ 
stantly bubbling to the surface like the bubbles in 
a glass of champagne; and so absolute was her 
restraint and self-control that she could allow her¬ 
self to be unusually frank and gracious. Was her 
cheerfulness a little glacial, like bright sunshine 
on the snow? Perhaps; he could not be certain 
yet. And the line of her mouth, where it was 
not curved in a tolerant smile, had it not a touch of 
cruelty and ruthlessness expressed in it? Again, 
he could not be sure. There was no malice in her 
pleasant gossip, but there was something judicial 
in her clear glance which suggested that with her 
the quality of mercy might be intermittent. She 
was dressed in green, of a shade which admirably 
toned with her bright hair, and he noticed that she 
was maquillee with the subtlest art. Her age, he 
guessed, was thirty-four or thirty-five. The sur- 


206 


NOBODY KNOWS 


face impression which she made was of a well- 
poised, well-bred, contented woman, confident and 
self-sufficient, knowing her world, observant and 
intelligent; but withdrawn. In that detachment, in 
what caused it and in what it meant, lay, he 
guessed, her secret. She had a life of her own, 
interests of her own, which she did not share with 
anyone — her mind was a walled garden, perhaps, 
in which she alone walked. Trespassers would be 
prosecuted — perhaps executed. (Those eyes 
looked capable of a capital sentence!) But that 
did not daunt him. 

While they drank their tea and talked about 
pictures, about Florence, about London, about the 
friends they had in common, Gilbert gradually 
ceased to exist as Gilbert Vayle, and became 
merely the novelist at work, as inhuman as a por¬ 
trait painter studying his subject. With the artist’s 
absolute lack of scruple he tried to clamber up 
that wall and to look over the top. All his in¬ 
tellect, sensitiveness, imagination, experience, and 
understanding were bent to that one end. It was 
an obsessing, but not an ignoble curiosity. He 
must know more about this woman even than she 
knew about herself. And if he, in his turn, lay 
exposed with all his weaknesses, folly and self- 
indulgence before her pitiless eyes, what did that 
matter? His collection of personal idiocies and 
oddities were merely the queer fleshly envelope in 
which his talent was wrapped up. He would “give 
himself away” happily in handfuls, if by so doing 


NOBODY KNOWS 


207 


he could weaken her guard and creep into the 
citadel of her heart. In the moment when she had 
Gilbert Vayle, the man, at her mercy, she herself 
would inevitably be revealed to Gilbert Vayle, the 
observer and recorder. All these thoughts and 
ideas remained in his subconscious, uncoined in 
words and phrases, and while he laughed and 
chattered he was scarcely, with his outer brain, 
aware that all the time he was probing, testing, 
exploring, watching, studying the woman at 
his side. 

Gilbert’s progress with Mrs. Vincent was 
assisted, almost violently, by the Wandervogel, 
who made no secret of her regard for him. Even 
his most fatuous remarks seemed to enchant her. 
“Mummie, do ask Queer Man if he’ll come and 
dine with us at our beastly pension,” she urged, 
when her mother showed signs of making her 
departure. Mrs. Vincent turned and looked at him 
and smiled. 

“Yes, I do wish you would, Mr. Vayle, though 
the food isn’t anything to boast of.” 

Gilbert accepted with pleasure and then, as an 
afterthought, suggested that they might like to 
dine with him at his hotel, for a change. Mrs. 
Vincent considered the matter for a moment, but 
again allowed herself to be stampeded by the 
Wandervogel who produced the unanswerable 
argument that they would be able to play beavers. 
“It’s no fun at the pension,” she explained, 
“because we know all the beavers there by heart.” 


208 


NOBODY KNOWS 


So they went off together, found a cab outside 
Cleopatra’s gates and drove into Florence. Two 
hours later saw Gilbert waiting for them in the 
foyer of the Hotel Mazzini. He had almost given 
them up, when at last they made their appearance. 
With them there seemed to enter the commonplace 
hotel a ray of light and colour, a kind of clean, 
tonic brilliance. Josephine Vincent, from the first 
moment of their meeting, had made that impres¬ 
sion on him. In a queer way, she suggested a 
shining sword blade, and her voice held in it the 
laughter of courage in unequal combat. 

The dining-room of the Hotel Mazzini was 
much like the dining-room of every other hotel of 
its kind throughout the world, and the food was as 
completely devoid of native idiosyncrasy and 
charm as the management could contrive to make 
it. The guests were of all nationalities, but of a 
perfectly uniform dullness. Mrs. Vincent, who 
was dressed in a wine-red frock, with a red rose at 
her neck (the Wandervogel was still faithful to 
gentian blue), gave the room one quick glance, 
and Gilbert, who read her thought, wished that he 
had had the sense to take them to some trattoria , 
to Nardini’s or to the Nuova Toscana. He 
guessed that she knew this sort of thing too well 
not to be bored by it. 

If the food was rather characterless, the 
Cinzano Asti was excellent. Mrs. Vincent was a 
good talker, quick, tactful, and intelligent. She 
had the knack of creating the successful dinner 


NOBODY KNOWS 


209 


party “atmosphere,” and he guessed that during 
her married life she must have been a singularly 
pleasant hostess. The conversation soon turned 
upon Florence of which she seemed to have a very 
intimate knowledge. To Gilbert who — accus¬ 
tomed as he was to short holidays — was inclined 
to take the “sights” for granted, and to get the 
atmosphere of a city from a lazy cafe crawl, his 
guest’s description of the surrounding country was 
a revelation of all that he had missed. She told 
him about Vallombrosa, with its sombre pine 
woods; about the two streams, the Affrico and the 
Mensola, which Boccaccio must have known so 
well in his boyhood; and about the little hill of 
Incontro, where St. Francis — the brother of the 
little birds — encountered that angular zealot, 
Saint Dominick, who instigated the massacre of 
the Albigense. “It must have been a strange meet¬ 
ing, that,” said Gilbert. “I wonder if Brother 
Juniper was with St. Francis, and if he saved the 
situation by making an inspired ass of himself!” 

Juniper was a great favourite of Mrs. Vincent’s. 
“I believe he must be one of the best drawn 
characters in any literature,” she said. “He is so 
perfectly drawn that you can’t describe him— 
except by quoting the actual words of the fioretti. 
‘Inspired ass’ isn’t a bit right, you know. There 
isn’t any of the real flavour of Brother Juniper in 
that!” Josephine Vincent seemed to know all the 
famous stories connected with the castles and villas 
in the neighbourhood of Florence. Most of them 


210 


NOBODY KNOWS 


Gilbert had read in his childhood in a fascinating 
book by Mrs. Oliphant, but many he had almost 
entirely forgotten. She reminded him of the 
beautiful Ginevra dei Benci, whose portrait he 
remembered in Ghirlandajo’s fresco in Sta Maria 
Novella. “Surely you know the tale of Ginevra?” 
she asked. But Gilbert shook his head. “While 
the poor child was playing hide and seek 
on the evening before her marriage, she hid her¬ 
self in a great cassone of carved wood. When 
she got into the chest, the heavy lid fell down 
upon her, snapping the lock fast. In vain her 
parents and her distracted lover searched all the 
rooms in the palace. Many years afterwards, 
when the old chest was forced open, they found her 
body. Her long fair hair was still beautiful, and 
in her right hand she grasped a jewel which the 
bridegroom had given her to fasten her gown!” 
She told him also the story of Tullia d’Arragona, 
the courtesan, who aspired to be another Sappho, 
and whose verses—polished up for her, no doubt, 
by Benedetto Varchi—had at least been good 
enough to induce the appreciative Duke Cosimo, on 
the strength of them, to excuse her from wearing 
the yellow veil. “Benedetto’s house, the Villa 
Fontebuoni, is within easy walking distance. You 
really ought to go and see it—and the Villa 
Palmieri, too, which is of course much more 
magnificent. That’s supposed to be the place to 
which Pampinea led her companions, in order that 
they might not be disturbed. Don’t you remember 


NOBODY KNOWS 


211 


the description of it in the Decameron? I’ve often 
looked for the Ladies’ Valley, to see if I could 
find the little lake in which they bathed, but I’ve 
never been able to find it. Perhaps it has dis¬ 
appeared : though things last long in this country.” 

Gilbert did not like to ask her about her 
ancestry, but he realized now, in a flash, his guest’s 
resemblance to a much-painted Renaissance type. 
Was it of one of Lippo Lippi’s Madonnas that she 
reminded him, or was it of a portrait of one of 
the d’Este family? The picture for which he was 
groping in his memory kept eluding him. If he 
could only recall it, it would perhaps explain 
why it was that he was so certain that he had seen 
her before, explain that curious sub-conscious 
recognition. 

“I do hope you haven’t written a book about 
Florence,” he remarked, laughing. 

“Good gracious, no,” she replied. “There are 
at least two thousand gaunt English spinsters 
living here—some of them have lived here for 
generations—and everyone of them has compiled 
a large work. What the feminine section of the 
English Colony doesn’t know about the history of 
Florence, of its principal families and ancient 
buildings, simply isn’t knowledge. They are 
indefatigable. It’s scarcely decent.” 

“It’s lucky the Villa Flora is too modern to 
have a history,” Gilbert observed. “Other¬ 
wise Austin Dodge and Cleopatra would be busy 
writing it. As it is I suspect Dodge of a mono- 


212 


NOBODY KNOWS 


graph on his beloved fountain. How that man 
adores Baroque! As soon as they are married, 
Cleopatra will buy him a touring car, and off 
they’ll go together to Lecce, with the excellent 
Martin Briggs open on their laps. Mosquitoes, 
bugs, and Baroque always go together. Poor 
Cleopatra, what a time she’ll have of it for the 
next few years!” 

“It’s my belief that they are going to be very 
happy,” said Mrs. Vincent, quickly. “She de¬ 
serves to be, anyway.” 

She took a meditative puff at her cigarette and 
gazed straight in front of her. Gilbert wondered 
what her thoughts were about. 

“I say,” put in the Wandervogel, “do you like 
walking?” 

“At night I do,” Gilbert replied. “ But not 
in the day time. I’m dreadfully lazy, and the cabs 
here are much too cheap.” 

“Because I’ve got a splendid idea. There’s a 
huge moon going on outside, and it would be 
perfectly ripping to walk up towards S. Miniato, 
as far as the Piazzale. We’d see Florence all 
shining and wonderful at our feet, wouldn’t we, 
Mummy? I love that sort of fairyland feeling, 
you know, sort of . . .” The Wandervogel 

blushed and “dried up.” With her, “sort of” 
always indicated an attempt to express the 
inexpressible. 

“Don’t let the child bully you into taking 
us for a walk if you don’t feel energetic!” said 


NOBODY KNOWS 213 

Mrs. Vincent, “but it might be rather nice up 
there.” 

Gilbert thought the idea excellent, and they 
set off without delay. When they had crossed the 
river and were nearing the Porta Romana, they 
turned down a dark street and were met by a crowd 
of two or three hundred people following—in 
absolute silence—four men with guitars. They 
marched in step, and at a sharp pace. Then 
suddenly the leaders began to sing the inevitable 
“Siamo i fascisti,” which was taken up enthusi¬ 
astically by the marching crowd. After a while 
there was silence again. The leaders of the party 
appeared to have an objective, for when they 
reached a certain house they halted their followers. 
One of them then advanced a few paces, struck 
an attitude and began to sing a love song in a 
high tenor voice. The singer made up in emotion¬ 
alism what his voice lacked in quality, and sobbed 
and choked with the greatest fervour. 

Windows on all sides were thrown open, and 
eager heads appeared. When the song was over 
there were cries of “bravo!” and “bene! bene!” 
Gilbert listened entranced until the singers again 
moved on, with the crowd following them as 
before. 

“Some of the older stornelli and rispetti are 
charming,” Mrs. Vincent observed. “I’ll hum a 
few of the airs to you if you like, when we get 
away from the houses.” 

When they were among the planes and cypress 


214 


NOBODY KNOWS 


trees of the beautiful road which leads along the 
hill-top to the Piazzale Michelangelo, Gilbert 
kept her to her promise. Where they paused, there 
was a wooden seat on which they were glad to sit 
after their climb. “I wish I had my guitar with 
me,” Mrs. Vincent said. “It’s such an amusing 
instrument.” 

“Sing ‘Sette bellezze,’ Mummy,” Margery 
suggested. 

“Yes, if you like,” Mrs. Vincent replied. “It’s 
a description of the seven beauties the perfect 
woman ought to possess.” 

In the still night, while the moon bathed the 
road in front of them with liquid silver, her voice 
rose with an almost inhuman purity. It was a 
voice which seemed as passionless as the notes of 
a flute. 

“Sette bellezze vuol’ aver la donna: 

Prime—che bella si possa chiamare; 

Alta dev’ esser senza la pianella 
E bianca e rossa senza su lisciare; 

Larga di spalla e stretta in cinturella; 

La bella bocca, e il bel nobil parlare. 

Se poi si tira su le bionde trecce, 

Decco la donna di sette bellezze.” 

Gilbert begged her to sing again. “I don’t 
know why, but I don’t feel like it to-night,” she 
said. “When it rains I sing for hours, some¬ 
times, to keep my spirits up. This night needs 
nothing.” 

“One more, Mummy!” urged the enraptured 
Wandervogel. 


NOBODY KNOWS 


215 


Mrs. Vincent thought for a moment. “Here is 
rather a characteristic old peasant song. It comes 
from Pisa, I think. Perhaps you know it? 

“ ‘Quando nascete voi nacque un bel fiore, 

La luna si fermo nel caminare, 

Le stelle si cangarion di colore. 

O Biondina, come la va, 

Senza la vela la barca non va!’” 

The air of the stornella , full of “fioriture” and 
“ girigogoli ,” had a charm which lost nothing in 
the rendering. Gilbert, always deeply moved by a 
beautiful voice, was too much stirred to make any 
comment. “Come along,” cried Josephine, jump¬ 
ing to her feet, “let’s get on to the Piazzale and 
look down at Florence!” 

They walked on quickly, and in silence until, 
arrived at last at the famous point of vantage 
underneath San Miniato, they paused and stood 
spellbound at the beauty of the scene before them. 
There, framed in its half-circle of shadowy hills, 
the city lay transfigured in the moonlight. It was 
a dream city, lovelier in its unearthly dignity and 
grace than anything that the imagination could 
conceive. The Wandervogel uttered one “Oh!” 
that was almost a sigh. Then she turned away 
from the parapet, and went down the steep path 
and hid herself among the trees. Gilbert stood 
still for some minutes before he noticed that he was 
alone. They were minutes of sheer ecstacy, 
ecstacy of a kind which he had only once experi¬ 
enced since his boyhood. When he awoke, as if 


216 


NOBODY KNOWS 


from a trance, he turned to look for his friends, 
and followed them down the hill. For a while he 
could not find either of them and paused to look 
again on Florence. Then at last he saw Josephine. 
She was gazing down at him from under a great 
cypress tree on the right of where he was stand¬ 
ing. The moon shone upon her face and hair, 
and he could see that she was smiling. Immedi¬ 
ately he recognised her, not as Josephine Vincent 
but as his dream companion of that far-off but 
unforgettable night. His heart beat painfully 
as he ran towards her. “Oh!” he cried, “it’s you!” 
This time she did not vanish, and the lips that met 
his own were real — and warm. 

“Well, you really are the Queer Man!” said 
Josephine, with laughter in her voice. It was the 
same low musical laughter, and the eyes, which 
danced with amusement as they looked inquiringly 
into his, were the same compassionate eyes that 
he so well remembered. To think that he had 
taken all this time to realise who she was. 

“Some time I’ll tell you,” he said, rather con¬ 
fusedly. “I . . . recognised you.” 

She laughed again, and taking his arm led him 
down to the road. He was vaguely conscious of 
being, ever so tactfully, “managed.” “Here’s 
Margery!” Mrs. Vincent exclaimed. 

The Wandervogel came running to meet them. 
“Kiss me, too, Gilbert!” she said, panting for 
breath. “Kiss me, too!” She threw her arms 


NOBODY KNOWS 


217 


round his neck and gave him a childish hug. Then 
she observed meditatively, “I knew Mummy 
would like you. You see you’re so awfully 
funny!” 


CHAPTER XXIII 


In London Josephine Vincent seemed like a 
brilliant modern picture in an old and elaborate 
frame. Her house at Hampstead near to the flag¬ 
staff had been inherited by her husband from his 
father, and with the exception of Mrs. Vincent’s 
long drawing-room, remained very much as Mar¬ 
gery’s grandfather had left it. The Reverend 
William Vincent, D.D., had been one of those 
comfortably-placed clergymen of the Victorian era 
who preferred the pursuit of the more respectable 
branches of scholarship to the cure of souls. He 
had been a demy of Magdalen, had subsequently 
married and settled down in a charming Georgian 
Rectory in Herefordshire. Here he lived the easy 
life of a country gentleman, rode occasionally to 
hounds, travelled when the fancy took him, and 
spent his abundant leisure in the study of the 
Divina Commedia. At forty-five a mild spell of 
ill-health, caused principally by boredom with the 
country and a growing impatience to live for a 
year or two in Italy, impelled him to retire from 
his spiritual labours. The two years in Italy on 
which he had for so long set his heart completely 
restored his vigour. On his return to England, 
he bought the delightful house at Hampstead, 
218 


NOBODY KNOWS 


219 


which Margery and her mother now adorned, and 
in a year or two gave the results of his studies to 
the world in the shape of two imposing volumes. 
The remainder of his life he spent cultivating roses 
in his small, but sunny garden, presiding over 
meetings of various Dante societies and reading 
papers to learned institutions. His only son, 
Alan, after leaving Wellington passed creditably 
through “the Shop.” Alan Vincent’s first wife 
was a Bavarian girl, the daughter of a diplomat, 
whom he had encountered at a ball in Rome. 
This lady was drowned about eighteen months 
after Margery’s birth. Three years later, in the 
summer of 1913, Captain Vincent, as he then was, 
had met and married Josephine Daubeney, the 
daughter of the doctor in his old Herefordshire 
home. Dr. Daubeney, who was a widower, died 
just before the outbreak of the war, happy in the 
thought that his only child was comfortably settled 
in life. Less than two years after his death, Major 
Vincent was killed. Since that time Josephine and 
Margery had lived quietly at Hampstead, 
Josephine surrounded by a circle of more or less 
devoted admirers whom with consummate art she 
kept at a distance, but seldom allowed entirely to 
escape. These details of the family history 
Gilbert became acquainted with in small instal¬ 
ments, as his friendship with Josephine ripened. 
He and the Vincents had travelled home together, 
breaking the journey for a pleasant week of 
shopping and theatre going in Paris. Arrived 


220 


NOBODY KNOWS 


in London, Gilbert had declined to let the friend¬ 
ship lapse and Josephine had acquiesced. She 
accepted his invitations to dine, to go to theatres 
or to dances, giving him always to understand — 
though not offensively, for her manners were 
excellent — that she realised what a favour she 
was conferring upon him by so doing. They 
discovered that since they were of about the same 
age, and both, as dancers, belonged to the period 
of the waltz, their rather elementary jazz steps 
suited one another, and whenever the band 
grudgingly vouchsafed a waltz they enjoyed them¬ 
selves immensely. Josephine sometimes even 
admitted as much, during the drive home. 

As the weeks went by Gilbert found himself, 
unexpectedly at peace and contented. He took a 
comfortable maisonnette in a street of Victorian 
respectability in the St. John’s Wood district, 
furnished it with the help of Josephine’s excellent 
taste and of Maurice Burns’ practical eye for 
comfort, established Maurice there as a guest, and 
acquired the habit of dining with Josephine and 
the Wandervogel on Sunday evenings. Josephine 
liked singing for him, and to listen to her was one 
of the rarest joys he had ever experienced. But 
sometimes the sound of her voice made him pro¬ 
foundly uneasy. It came to him, as it were, “over 
the garden wall,” from inside that secret self which 
she kept so carefully from his prying eyes. That 
she had feeling, and perhaps passion, and that she 
still retained a great deal of her youth was once 


NOBODY KNOWS 


221 


betrayed when he chose for her a favourite song by 
Brahms, the “Leibestraum,” which she also 
particularly liked. When she was not singing, 
however, her manner remained one of reserved 
graciousness, of rather heartless kindliness and 
rather guarded friendship. He could not possibly 
complain of this as far as he himself was con¬ 
cerned; but it troubled him to find her repressing 
herself in this way — withering as it were, on the 
stalk, becoming incapable of folly. Charming as 
her home was there were times when he could have 
wished it burnt to ashes with all its imprisoning 
contents — the portraits of the Vincents, the min¬ 
iatures and silhouettes of the Daubeney’s, the 
family treasures acquired during generations of 
comfort which watchfully regarded her, which she 
jealously preserved. It enraged him to see a 
high-spirited, intelligent woman turning herself 
thus into a kind of super-parlour maid. He 
wanted to take a hatchet and cut her out of her 
frame. Let her go back to it in twenty years time, 
if she must. For her to cling to it now was a denial 
of life, a base avoidance of all the sorrows, the 
pangs of grief, the thrills, the ardours and en¬ 
durances of the adventure of living. She was turn¬ 
ing herself, at thirty-five, into the sheltered 
Victorian widow! 

If Gilbert arrived at these conclusions, it was 
because he had watched her closely and knew her 
well. On the surface, any one more daringly 
modern and unconventional than Josephine it 


222 


NOBODY KNOWS 


would have been impossible to discover. She 
scandalised her particular corner of Hampstead by 
her “goings on.” Queer foreigners and odd¬ 
looking Bohemians constantly came to her house. 
Secure in her own unassailable virtue, she adhered 
in theory to principles of startling modernity, the 
mere enunciation of which would have shocked her 
husband and given her father a stroke. She was 
interested also in politics, in “movements,” in 
modern thought and modern literature, and—as 
a critic — she had an uncanny insight. Of most of 
Gilbert’s productions, she held, if possible, a lower 
opinion than he had himself, and contrived to be 
candid without hurting his feelings. 

Safely anchored at last, in so far as his own 
affections were concerned, Gilbert was in no hurry 
to try to waken Josephine into the response which 
he so much desired. What she gave him already 
made such an enormous difference to his life that 
he could not bear to risk its loss. He did not refer 
again to the scene in the Piazzale Michelangelo, 
content that she should ascribe it to moon madness 
and to the beauty of the night. For the first time 
in his life he trusted blindly to Destiny: had 
confidence in his star. Sooner or later he would 
come to her — when they were ready for one 
another, and not before. 

Maurice watched the progress of his friend’s 
latest love affair with absorbed interest, and much 
melancholy foreboding. “She’s a delightful 
woman, a staunch friend, perhaps the perfect 


NOBODY KNOWS 


223 


mistress for you,” he remarked one night, as they 
sat together over the fire in Gilbert’s room, “but 
why on earth do you want to marry? You aren’t 
a poor lamb who doesn’t know. I should have 
thought. . . He took a drink from his glass 
of whisky and soda and stared, ruminating, into 
the fire. “Surely Josephine would sooner have 
you as a lover than a husband?” he went on. “Her 
views on marriage seem to be almost as uncon¬ 
ventional as Tobey Walker’s.” 

“Perhaps — on the surface. But not under¬ 
neath,” said Gilbert. “It’s the desire for children 
which drives people into the noose.” 

“Ugh, I hate children.” Maurice shuddered. 

“I’ve told myself for years past that I hate 
them. But I don’t believe it’s true. I badly want 
a daughter: and I miss Gillie. I wish I had the 
sort of home that he could come back to for his 
holidays. Josephine likes him — they took to one 
another immediately. She is good with children, 
and she would make an excellent mother. If she 
takes me on, I simply haven’t the right to deny her 
a child if she want’s one. That means we shall 
have to marry. But there’s a very big ‘if.’ ” 

“Not so big as all that,” said Maurice, cyni¬ 
cally. “The average ‘admirer’ runs like a hare if 
it ever comes to actually taking the plunge. Didn’t 
you see Maugham’s play, ‘Caroline?’ The 
‘unattainable ’—she s the real attraction. The 
danglers who mean business are a scarce 
commodity. Besides, women usually like you. 


224 


NOBODY KNOWS 


It’s probably the way your hair grows, or your 
occasional helplessness, or a look you’ve got in 
your eyes as if something was hurting you. I 
don’t know. Women have their own reasons 
just as men have. Nobody has ever solved the 
mysteries of attraction!” 

“I’m afraid you are flattering me, my dear 
boy,” said Gilbert, laughing. “But to return to 
marriage, one of the worst things about it is the 
awful asceticism it usually involves.” He looked 
round the cosy room, watched the firelight shining 
on the decanter and the soda water syphon, looked 
at his own toes in comfortable red Turkish slippers, 
and at Maurice’s kindly and familiar face. “It 
would mean leaving all this, for example. 
Slippered ease and perfect freedom mean a lot, 
when you’ve only arrived at them after seventeen 
years of struggle, misery and servitude. They’re 
a temptation at all events.” 

He stretched himself luxuriously in his chair 
and refilled his glass, wondering if he had deceived 
Maurice by his half-truths. Maurice looked at his 
friend and smiled rather dismally. Then he called 
softly to their cat. “Goo! Goo!” From some¬ 
where in the shadows there came a feline gurgle of 
pleasure and a heavy black half-Persian cat 
emerged and leapt with luxurious deliberation on 
to Maurice’s lap. First it arched its back, then it 
put its paws on Maurice’s shoulders and looked 
him in the face. Then it looked away with an 
expression of boredom that was almost contemp- 


NOBODY KNOWS 


225 


tuous: then sat down sticking a hind leg up in 
the air while it bent its head and solemnly bit and 
licked the fur on its belly. Then it stopped this 
operation, yawned, settled itself really comfort¬ 
ably, put a paw over its nose, and took no further 
interest in the proceedings. Maurice and Gilbert 
watched their beloved Guli in complete silence, 
absorbed. Everything he did, every movement he 
made struck them as being perfectly beautiful: 
they loved him with the anxious tenderness and 
affection which a mother is supposed to lavish on 
her youngest child. They coaxed him to his food, 
applauded his big game hunting exploits — he 
liked to drag home the carcasses of half eaten rats, 
and would scratch at their doors to attract attention 
to his prowess—rose in the cold dawn to let him 
in or out of the flat, scoured the streets for him 
when he got lost, gave him the most comfortable 
parts of their beds to sleep on and would not move 
for fear of disturbing him. He was the beloved 
tyrant of the household, and his great gold eyes, 
aloof, mysterious and without a glimmer of 
affection in them, had a charm for both Maurice 
and Gilbert which never failed in its effect. 

“Well, one can’t have everything, I sup¬ 
pose — ” Gilbert reflected, rather lugubriously 
counting his chickens before they were hatched. 
“Maurice will have to have Guli!” He experi¬ 
enced, in advance, all the pangs of separation. 
Then he laughed aloud as the thought came to him 
that he had been complaining of the way Josephine 


226 


NOBODY KNOWS 


was “framed” and imprisoned in her furniture 
when all the time he had been busy trying to 
“frame” himself in precisely the same way. 
There they were, Josephine and he, two healthy 
active people, both on the bright side of forty, 
rapidly growing into “bachelors with settled 
habits!” No, it was better to wear out than to 
rust out. Let the weather be fair or foul, he’d go 
out in it until he died. 

“Maurice, old boy,” he said at last, “if I can 
persuade Jose to risk it, I shall have another shot at 
married life. Yes, even in 1923! I don’t believe 
there is anything wrong with marriage, in itself. 
It isn’t old-fashioned. On the contrary it is an 
institution for which the human race has not yet 
shown itself worthy. These reformers are on the 
wrong tack. It’s we, not the sacrament itself, that 
want improving. My chances may not look 
bright, but Jose will help me, and I shall do my 
best. It’s an adventure, Maurice. The adventure! 
And at least we’ve both of us had some experience 
of what we are in for.” 

“At least,” said Maurice, “between the two of 
you, you’ll have enough to live on if you don’t 
play the fool with it. And that’s the essential 
thing. But I wish you luck, Gilbert, with all my 
heart. When you’ve fixed it up I shall borrow 
fifty quid from you and go to Tahiti. That’s my 
dream, you know. No marriages for me!” They 
shook hands when they parted to go to their respec¬ 
tive bedrooms, for they both realised that from 


NOBODY KNOWS 


227 


now onwards their ways lay apart. “Good luck, 
old man,” said Maurice. “Go in and win. If it 
doesn’t work out all right, come and join me in 
the South Seas.” 


CHAPTER XXIV 


Gilbert had just got back one day after lunch¬ 
ing at his club, when a double knock came at the 
door — the official post office knock. It was a 
telegram, from Mr. Wilson-Hepbum, and the 
message was, “Come at once; boy seriously 
injured.” He wrote out a reply, with shaking 
hand, then, putting some things into a suit-case he 
drove to Waterloo. He was fortunate in arriving 
just in time to catch a train. Short as the journey 
is to Woking, it seemed to him interminable, and 
all the time his thoughts were on his son. Until 
the receipt of this news that Gillie had had an 
accident, and might perhaps be dead, he had never 
completely realised how much his hopes were 
bound up in the boy, and how much he loved him, 
how much he had wanted to do for him, how 
greatly, as a father, he had failed. Less than a 
week ago, Gillie had spent the whole day at Hamp¬ 
stead with Jose and the Wandervogel. The little 
devil! He had occupied most of the afternoon 
chasing Margery round the garden and yelling 
at the top of his voice. And then what a tea the 
child had managed to put away! Jose spoilt him, 
utterly. Surely, surely that sturdy little ruffian 
in the blue jersey, who was so clearly going to 
228 


NOBODY KNOWS 


229 


grow up into an active, athletic man, couldn’t have 
gone and injured himself permanently? A broken 
leg, perhaps — it couldn’t be anything worse. 
His mood alternated between hope and despair as 
the minutes, with what seemed unbearable slow¬ 
ness, ticked themselves away. 

When at last he arrived at Woking, he rushed 
out of the station, and hurried along the familiar 
streets towards The Laurels. The clean and 
joyous April sunshine mocked his fears and made 
even suburbia look radiant. The door was opened 
to him by old Mrs. Marsh, the Wilson-Hepburn’s 
housekeeper who had once been Chloe’s nurse. He 
had no need to ask any questions now. “Oh 
sir!” she gasped. “Oh, sir!” 

“Where is he?” he murmured. 

“In his cot, upstairs, the poor little innocent, 
with a smile on his face like he used to have when 
he was playing.” 

Gilbert ran up the stairs, and was met on the 
landing by Mr. and Mrs. Wilson-Hepburn. The 
old man — who adored his grandson — was cry¬ 
ing, silently. And even in his agony, Gilbert could 
not help noticing the splendid way in which Mrs. 
Wilson-Hepburn was rising to the occasion. 
“Chloe is with him, Gilbert,” she said, in a hushed 
whisper. “Go in to her.” 

He went in to the nursery. The blinds were 
half drawn and patches of sunlight fell on the 
polished floor. Chloe was kneeling by the cot in 
the comer of the room, looking intently at Gillie’s 


230 


NOBODY KNOWS 


white face. Gilbert went quietly over to her and 
put his hand on her shoulder and looked too. So 
Gillie was out of it all! Nothing left of him but 
a little battered male body, lying there waiting to 
be put in a hole in the earth. Gilbert wondered 
how soon the essential Gillie, a stranger to his 
parents as they were strangers to one another, 
would contrive to find another fleshly tenement. 
How long would he have to wait for his next 
troublesome earthly journey — years or cen¬ 
turies? “Anyhow, better luck next time, Gillie,” 
he murmured. “Better luck and happier parents.” 

Chloe began to cry silently, and Gilbert’s 
arm slipped round her in a familiar gesture of 
sympathy and comfort. For a moment they both 
forgot the fact that they were officially disunited. 
Between them they had brought into the world the 
child whose small broken body lay so near them, 
still and stiff in death. 

This was really the breaking of the tie that 
bound them, Gilbert reflected — not the divorce, 
not Chloe’s second marriage: but Gillie’s death. 
This was indeed the end. They had met, loved, 
parted: but while the child lived they knew that 
they had never really escaped one another. They 
were still related. And now the relationship was 
broken. 

Chloe began to tell him how the accident had 
happened. Gillie had hit his ball into the next 
garden. He had climbed the wall to go after it — 
a very difficult and daring climb for him. And 


NOBODY KNOWS 


231 


then he had lost his balance and fallen right down 
on to the paving stones by the back door and 
broken his neck. He had climbed the wall at its 
highest and most dangerous point because it was 
only there that he could get foot-holds — all the 
rest of the wall, the new part, was too smooth. 
“Nobody was in the garden when it happened,” 
Chloe moaned. “They didn’t find him till nearly 
half an hour afterwards. He was dead by the 
time I got here.” They clung together for a 
moment, unable to speak. Then Gilbert led her 
out of the room and closed the door behind them. 
He had noticed that she was going to have another 
child, and with a care for her that came natural to 
him, had thought it best to take her away. . . . 

Chloe’s condition was gratefully seized upon 
by Mrs. Wilson-Hepburn as an excuse for the exer¬ 
cise of her gifts. Over the teacups she developed 
a ghoulish cheerfulness and talked relentlessly 
about the political situation, the perfidiousness of 
the French and the future of Mr. Lloyd George. 
Gilbert was grateful to her. They all wanted to 
be alone: but since they all had to be together, 
and would not be able to escape until after the 
funeral, this was probably the best way of endur¬ 
ing it. He developed theories about the League 
of Nations, and argued with Mrs. Wilson- 
Hepburn as to the desirability of re-arming the 
Germans. 


CHAPTER XXV 


“So there wasn’t really anything else to do 
about it,” said Tobey, rather shamefacedly. They 
had met casually in Piccadilly, about two months 
after Gillie’s funeral, and Tobey was telling 
Gilbert the news about himself. “Of course, I 
was never really a bigot on the subject of 
marriage. I always realised there were excep¬ 
tional cases when one had to conform. . . 

“Oh Tobey,” said Gilbert, “Oh Tobey!” 

“You never really understood my point of 
view, you see,” Tobey went on. He was confused, 
and for once in a way rather flustered. He was 
terribly afraid that Gilbert would think that Betty 
Carson had married him; aware, too, that the 
Tobey legend was in danger of going to pieces. 
And it wasn’t so easy to explain, there were 
nuances in the situation which defied all his efforts 
at exposition. Gilbert ought to understand . 
“Betty understands perfectly he said, with 
unusual vehemence. 

“I’ll swear she does.” 

“Oh, well, if you are going to be unfriendly 
about it . . . ” 

“What rubbish,” Gilbert retorted. “I’m 
delighted. I always thought it would happen, 
232 


NOBODY KNOWS 


233 


and I shall insist on being godfather to the first.” 

“There isn’t going to be a first, or a second 
either.” 

“Then why marry?” 

“Look here, I’m off,” said Tobey, now genu¬ 
inely irritated. “Come and look us up. We’ve 
got a flat in Harcourt Street — top floor, number 
22. And by the way, Dodge and Cleopatra are 
in London, happy as birds. They’re staying at 
the Carlton.” Tobey waved his hand and dived 
into the Dover Street Tube Station. 

Left alone, Gilbert strolled vaguely in the 
direction of Hampstead. He was supposed to be 
at the theatre attending a rehearsal of “The Silent 
Stranger,” but he had long ago discovered that 
the author, particularly if he were an unknown and 
amateur playwright, was regarded by the producer 
and the company alike as their natural enemy. 
They never paid any attention to his suggestions 
if they could possibly help it, and the long and 
dreary proceedings filled him with impatience. 
The play was to be put on in three weeks’ time, 
and he determined to leave it alone until the dress 
rehearsal. He had an instinct that the show would 
make money. Somehow, everything he touched 
made money in these days — now that he didn’t so 
very much care whether he made it or not. The 
world was become a pleasant, rather prosaic place; 
and he told himself that he had grown too old for 
rapture, too phlegmatic for ecstacy, too much 
seasoned by emotion ever again, in the Baudel- 


234 


NOBODY KNOWS 


airean sense, to be “drunken.” All the same, if 
his steps were taking him anywhere they were 
taking him towards Jose. When he got as far as 
Baker Street Station, as the sun was hot and he 
felt tired and rather dusty, he got into a cab and 
gave her address. 

Jose and the Wandervogel were both in the 
garden when he arrived, sitting in deck chairs 
under the big pear tree. He had guessed they 
would be there, and had walked straight through 
by the side door, without troubling the maids. 

Margery noticed him first, and shouted his 
name with her usual enthusiasm. She threw him 
a cushion to sit on, and looked at him with close, 
maternal scrutiny. “Mummy,” she observed, 
“I do think you’re rotten to Gilbert. He obviously 
wants a rest and a change. (Don’t you, old 
thing?) Why don’t you take him down to Mrs. 
Blodgett’s cottage at Burlton Ledge, when I go to 
Aunt Mary’s and make him bathe every day before 
breakfast?” 

Jose blushed, rather prettily. She belonged 
just enough to the older generation to be taken 
aback at moments by the Wandervogel’s modern 
candour. “Perhaps he doesn’t want to bathe 
every day before breakfast, poor man. Do you, 
Gilbert?” 

“I’m frightfully lazy,” said Gilbert. “But 
I’m good at doing what I’m told. And of course, 
I like to be told.” 

“That’s arranged, then!” said Margery, who 


NOBODY KNOWS 


235 


had conceived this plan for Gilbert when she had 
noticed the change in him after Gillie’s death. 
She wished Jose had conceived it first — of her 
own bat. But Jose, even if the idea occurred to 
her, would have smothered the thought and done 
nothing about it. Sometimes Margery felt that 
the education of her step-mother was almost 
beyond her capacity. But she did not despair. 
Jose would yield to treatment in time. Firmness 
and patience would do the trick! “I’ll make 
Mummy wire to Mrs. Blodgett at the cottage at 
Burlton Ledge, and you’ll both start off from 
Waterloo, towels in hand, at eleven o’clock on 
Monday morning. You won’t want any bathing 
costumes, because The Ledge is quite deserted and 
nobody minds. I shall see you off, and then I shall 
go and irritate Aunt Mary.” 

The Wandervogel grinned malevolently at 
the thought of irritating Aunt Mary. “She’s 
thoroughly stuffy, isn’t she, Mummy? I feel it 
my duty to wake her up. I’ve invented a little 
song for her. It goes like this.” 

The Wandervogel threw her head back and 
emitted loud noises, like a boy scout’s howl. As 
far as Gilbert could discover the words of the 
“song,” the serenade to Aunt Mary, were as 
follows: 

“I’m pro-German, Yah, yah, yah, 

I’m pro-German, Yah, yah, yah, 

I’m pro-German, Yah . . . yah . . . yah.” 

“After that I show her for the ’umpteenth time 


236 


NOBODY KNOWS 


my photograph of Hans, standing on a slope of 
the Wetterstein with hardly any clothes on, looking 
like a Greek God,” Margery continued. “And 
then Aunt Mary nearly chokes and looks as if she’d 
like to tell me that Mummy is an awful woman 
to allow it. It’s great fun. Almost as good as 
egg-beavers.” 

“It may be for you,” said Jose, “but I expect 
Aunt Mary really does think I’m an awful woman. 
Besides, we aren’t all as pro-German as you are. 
The Aunt Marys are in the majority.” 

“Mummy, don’t pretend to be as middle 
aged and pre-war as that,” said the Wandervogel. 
“It doesn’t suit you, and it won’t impress Gilbert in 
the least. He thinks he’s middle aged, too. 
Nothing left to live for. L’homme fatal! In¬ 
cipient dyspepsia and all the rest of it. I know. 
It’s all rot. All he needs is fresh air and exercise. 
You’re both of you as young as anything. . . 

“What’s that got to do with being pro-Ger¬ 
man?” said Gilbert. 

“Why, Germany is the country of the young,” 
said the Wandervogel rapturously, “the country 
that’s alive, vital, splendid. France is a wretched, 
corrupt old miser, cruel and perfidious, used up, 
impure to the very bottom of the cash-register it 
calls its heart. All my generation is pro-German,” 
added the Wandervogel sententiously. “We love 
music and dancing, and lakes and mountains, and 
wine and song.” 

“And beer, bathing, binges, and Bavaria, 


NOBODY KNOWS 237 

too, I hope!” said Gilbert, who received a well- 
aimed cushion as a reward for his interruption. 
“It will really be rather amusing, though,” he 
went on, “if Germany and the Germans become 
our closest allies in four or five years’ time. It’s 
quite likely, when you come to think of it. After 
all, we and the Germans understand one another 
ever so much better than the French and English 
ever will. German hospitality and amiability and 
their sense of humour and their ernstness are 
qualities that should make friendship with them 
easy. They aren’t so terribly insular as the 
French. The French wear their amiability as they 
wear their pretty clothes; they haven’t any humour, 
and their hospitality is all on the street. Besides, 
they really want to blow our island to smithereens, 
if they get the chance. They are the real 
militarists of Europe, just as they were a century 
ago.” 

“You and your latest fashions!” snorted Jose. 
“Just because the Bosche is all the rage this year, 
you both of you must go off your heads about 
him! I think these wild enthusiasms for countries 
and races are just as bad as their opposites, race 
hatreds. People everywhere are good and bad, as 
you find them, and all countries have their virtues 
and their vices. I’m not going to revile the French 
just because I don’t like the French Government. 
I don’t like the English Government either. I 
think they’re both composed, if anything, of worse 
scoundrels than the fools who blundered us into 


238 


NOBODY KNOWS 


war between 1900 and 1914. I’m pro-French, 
pro-English, pro-Irish, and pro-German, too. I’m 
pro-everybody!” 

“Of course, the truth about Mummy is that she 
has a g.p. for Italy,” observed the Wandervogel, 
shrewdly. “That’s why she didn’t mention Italy 
in her outburst. You’ll learn that about Mummy 
when you grow older, Gilbert. She’s a master¬ 
piece for not mentioning things. It’s high-bred 
reserve, by Meredith out of Jane Austen.” 

“Now then, you two!” Margery’s affectionate 
“digs” at Jose always amused Gilbert, and they 
never annoyed Jose. She had her own methods 
of retaliation, and she controlled Margery as a 
skilled driver controls a high-spirited and 
favourite horse. She had a deft hand with “the 
ribbons.” 

Tea was brought out to them, and demurely 
poured by Jose into blue china cups, thin and 
almost transparent. Jose had the knack of refrain¬ 
ing from too much artiness. If she were pre-war, 
she was also, in some details, pre-Omega. Her 
house contained no “leadless glaze.” 

When the exactly right moment came for his 
departure, Gilbert received the delicate wireless 
hint automatically emitted by Jose, and rose to go. 
He was perfectly well aware that the Wandervogel 
wanted him to stay until he got bored, to stay for 
weeks, if he liked. She accepted him, and when 
she accepted a person it meant that he was free of 
the house. Her hospitality was Russian in its 


NOBODY KNOWS 


239 


completeness and its unconcern. But Jose had 
been properly brought up. She really wanted him 
to stay and talk to her, she wanted to show him 
her work, to have him to herself: but she was 
inhibited. The proper length of time for an after¬ 
noon call was up, her brain registered the fact, and 
Gilbert went. 

Margery saw him to the street, and as he 
turned to leave her she said: “Did you see Mummy 
come all over girlish, when I suggested she should 
take you down to Burlton Ledge? Gilbert, if you 
two don’t come back properly married, I shall 
never never forgive you, so there!” 


CHAPTER XXVI 

Mrs. Blodgett’s cottage lay concealed in a 
hollow of the Purbeck Hills, about half a mile 
from the sea. It was a small stone house with a 
“stoep” in front of it and a long garden ending in 
a ragged wood through which ran the pathway to 
the beach. The house was roofed with flat slabs of 
grey Purbeck stone and the whole of the ground 
floor with the exception of the principle living 
room, was paved. Gilbert had in his life tra¬ 
velled many hundreds of miles to escape from 
civilisation into some unspoiled and undiscovered 
country, but never — save, perhaps, in Wicklow 
— had he been anywhere so completely off the 
beaten track as Burlton. He knew Dorsetshire 
very well, but though he had been from one end of 
the country to the other, he had never even heard 
of Burlton. To get to the high road, from the 
cottage, one had to walk for five and twenty 
minutes across the hills. Nothing on wheels could 
reach it except perhaps a farmer’s dog-cart driven 
with care. The nearest railway was eight miles 
distant. 

The house stood completely isolated. The 
nearest habitations were a farm about a mile away, 
240 


NOBODY KNOWS 


241 


the shepherd’s cottage which was close to the 
farm, and a desolate coast-guard station at Burlton 
Cove, distant about a mile and a half. 

Gilbert and Jose arrived, carrying their suit¬ 
cases and a large parcel of provisions bought in 
Corfe, at tea-time on a cloudless May afternoon. 
Mrs. Blodgett, an ample and eccentric woman 
dressed in black alpaca with a large Cornelian 
brooch at the neck, was there to receive them. She 
took Jose almost at once into the kitchen and ex¬ 
plained where everything was and promised to 
come in the morning and get the breakfast. She 
was staying with her sister, the shepherd’s wife, 
who was “expecting.” But personally she thought 
it would be a fortnight at least, probably longer. 
And she didn’t see why Sarah should be fussing 
about it, seeing why she had already buried three. 
“But sometimes when we’re that way we wants 
company like. And I thought that you and the 
gentleman would probably be able to manage your 
suppers.” Jose assured her that she and the gen¬ 
tleman could certainly manage their suppers, and 
after a few finishing touches to the preparation 
in the kitchen, Mrs. Blodgett put on her bonnet and 
departed, leaving Gilbert and Jose to themselves. 

After tea, they both changed into their oldest 
clothes. Gilbert attired himself in a pair of grey 
flannel trousers and a tennis shirt, and Jose 
replaced her travelling clothes by an old green 
frock that had seen much service. “You won’t 
want shoes or stockings,” she called out to Gilbert. 


242 NOBODY KNOWS 

“There’s nothing to hurt your feet between here 
and the sea.” 

When they were ready, with towels over their 
shoulders they walked down the long garden and 
through the wood, until they came to the stretch 
of greensward which ended abruptly in the cliff. 
But there was a pathway down the cliff side leading 
on to Burlton Ledge, a flat expanse of rock which 
the sea covered at high tide. The sun poured 
down upon them, and the sea, over which hung a 
very faint mist, glimmered with a pearly radiance. 
It was a dead calm, murmuring sea, caressing 
with the tiniest plash the little beach by the coast¬ 
guard’s cottage and giving the rocks on which 
they were sitting, a voluptuous watery kiss. Out 
at sea there were curious stretches of emerald 
green water, long thin lines of green separated one 
from another by blue expanses. And close to the 
horizon a toy steamer, with no smoke rising from 
her funnel, moved slowly onward as if impelled by 
clockwork. It was a coasting vessel making for 
Poole harbour. Looking inland they could see in 
the foreground the long indented line of yellow 
cliffs; the little cove, once the headquarters of a 
gang of smugglers; and above it the green, 
maternal breasts of the Purbeck hills. 

“How mad we are to run about Europe, Jose, 
when we have this — four hours from our own 
front doors! It’s so difficult to find what is so to 
speak under one’s nose. One searches in all 


NOBODY KNOWS 243 

directions, rushes wildly about the world — and 
all the time the thing sought for. . . .” 

“Is really hidden inside one’s self,” said Jose, 
with a curious smile. “The adventure of life is 
finding one’s own soul. Gnothi seauton! If you 
can achieve that, you can find all heaven in your 
own backyard. Travel only narrows the mind, 
and we all do it because we shrink from the job of 
finding our true selves. Meanwhile I’m going to 
find my true self in the water. Come on!” Jose 
slipped off her clothes, fitted a red rubber cap 
over her hair, and stood in the sunshine, on a 
ledge of rock. She waited for Gilbert to join 
her, then they dived together into the amorous 
inviting sea. They swam out slowly against the 
advancing tide through little pockets of intense 
cold into stretches of water that were almost as 
warm as the Adriatic. When they had gone about 
two hundred yards from the shore, they floated 
on their backs in the sunlight, silent, in ecstacy. 
Is not the sea liquid magic? Sea-lovers keep 
silent while they are swimming, just as lovers of 
dancing keep silent while they dance. 

When they got back to the ledge Jose ran like 
a wild creature round the flat expanse of rock. 
She had pulled off her bathing cap and her swathes 
of bright hair shone in the sunlight as she ran with 
long lissome strides, stretching out her arms as if 
in invitation, to the gentle breeze which came from 
the sea. Gilbert had never seen this Jose before. 
He could hardly recognise in the girl exulting in 


244 


NOBODY KNOWS 


her health and her physical perfection the assured 
social figure whom he had met in Florence and 
come to know in the dignified surroundings of 
Hampstead. It was a new Jose; the real Jose 
perhaps. Their race in the sunlight left them 
warm and glowing and practically dry. They put 
their clothes on quickly and walked back up the 
cliff path, and over the short springy turf to the 
little wood behind which lay the cottage. 

It was a moment of happiness so complete that 
Gilbert, who was apt to distrust good fortune, 
could hardly believe that he had not once again 
“crossed over” into the dream world, that it 
would not all vanish in some drab awakening 
which would leave him again bereft of Jose, as he 
had been bereft of her before. 

After supper, as they sat out on the stoep, in 
deck chairs, looking at the moon which shone 
down over the garden and threw into dark relief 
the group of trees at the end of it, he tried to 
tell her about his dream life, and the part she had 
played in it. 

“Then you really did think you recognised me 
that night in Florence?” Jose asked. 

“It’s queer. I’ve never been able to under¬ 
stand why I wasn’t more surprised by your strange 
goings on! I wasn’t you know. It seemed natural 
enough, some how. And yet I didn’t recognise 
you . . . then. ...” 

“And now, Jose?” he asked. 

“I don’t know. You’d better keep me in your 


NOBODY KNOWS 


245 


dream world, my dear. I don’t suppose the 
woman you saw in me then, is really the woman 
you would find, if ” She broke off her 

sentence in the middle, and looked out across the 
glistening, shadowy, mysterious garden. “I’m a 
very human, tiresome woman, Gilbert, and you 
won’t be able to mould me as you might a girl 
half my age . . . don’t you imagine it. I was 
taught ‘repose’ in my youth,” she went on, “but 
you, you great restless, worriting, dissatisfied 
thing! Dreams are safest for you, dear. I warn 
you.” 

He sat at her feet and laid his head against her 
knees. “0 Biondina ” he sang, “come la va? 
Senza la vela la barca non va!” Then he took her 
two hands and looked up at her, trying with 
desperation to climb that “garden wall,” • to see 
into her heart. In the sitting-room behind them, 
the lamp on the table diffused a yellow radiance, 
the light of actuality contrasting with the moon’s 
transfiguring, white, unearthly radiance. 

“Jose,” he said, softly. 

She smiled down at him, smiled with her blue 
eyes that now were dark, no less than with her 
lips. She smiled because she found him funny; 
and it was because he was so funny that she was 
tender towards him. 

Suddenly he rose and slipped one arm round 
her waist and another under her knees and lifted 
her bodily from the chair. He had not guessed 
that she was so light. She did not resist him. 


246 


NOBODY KNOWS 


“Well now, you great thing!” she murmured. 
He laughed and carried her into the room and 
laid her gently on the sofa. “I’ve brought you 
away from the moon,” he said. “Here are four 
friendly walls, dear, and the lamp alight on the 
table. I couldn’t kiss you when you were so far 
away from me.” She gave her mouth frankly 
rather than passionately, but her arm stole round 
his neck and held him close against her breast. 

“You great male creature,” she said, “why 
can’t you leave me alone? What a bother and a 
nuisance you all are to be sure. Don’t you know 
I’ve a lot of work to do without your worrying 
me?” 

“So have I, dear. And I’ve every intention 
of doing it.” 

“Why do you want me then? You aren’t in 
love with me?” 

“I don’t love you as a boy loves. But, in a 
queer way, you are home to me, Jose.” 

“I thought homes were out of fashion now— 
nasty prisons.” 

“Don’t you know how Englishmen hate 
moving,” he asked. “We want long leases, not 
short terms. I’m tired of all this moving about, 
sick of all this ‘passion’ and the life long love 
that lasts three months, and all the rest of it. I 
want to go home now.” 

“Well, you aren’t a romantic lover, my dear!” 

“I could be, Jose,” he replied, “only you 
would shriek with laughter, you wretch.” 


NOBODY KNOWS 247 

“If you marry me you’ll be marrying your 
grandmother. Don’t forget that.” 

“You aren’t any older than I am. ...” 

“Not in years, perhaps.” Again she smiled. 

“Would you feel better about it if we didn’t 
marry?” he asked. 

“No, I don’t think so. I keep my word when 
I’ve given it, however hard. When man and 
woman live together it’s always hard, at moments. 
One gets over the moments as a rule. One has 
to, if one has given one’s word.” 

“You are depressing, Jose,” said Gilbert, 
with a sigh. “Don’t you believe there is such a 
thing as love?” 

“Yes,” she said, “but there’s a great deal of 
difference between a girl’s love and a woman’s. 
Sometimes the one grows into the other. More 
often it does not. You and I are adults, my dear, 
and if we take each other for comrades, our love 
will show itself in loyalty. We must be faithful. 
. . . Oh, I’m not thinking of physical things. I 
shall be physically faithful to you because I 
haven’t your desires and because I have a little 
more control. Women have to acquire that, you 
know. What I mean is real fidelity. The 
foundation stone must be well and truly laid, 
dear, if we are going to build anything worth 
having.” 

“You are my home, Jose,” said Gilbert. 
“Don’t shut the door in my face.” 

“If I am your home, I won’t be your prison,” 


248 


NOBODY KNOWS 


she murmured, “and you mustn’t make yourself 
mine. But I wonder if you really have suffered 
enough to be able to settle down? It takes some 
doing for a man like you—you restless, dissatis¬ 
fied creature!” 

“Of course I have,” said Gilbert, laying his 
cheek against her breast. “We’ll grow tomatoes 
in the conservatory for Margery to eat, and we’ll 
have two babies, one of each ...” 

“It’s a mother you want to make me then, is it? 
As if we weren’t egoists enough without indulging 
in the incontinent egoism of having children.” 

Jose was silent for a while. Then suddenly she 
kissed him on the lips. 

“Perhaps we need each other, my dear one,” 
she murmured. “We’ll do our best.” 

“Then you won’t send me away from you 
again?” Gilbert asked. “Never again, from this 
moment?” 

“No, dear, I won’t send you away,” Jose 
answered, and her arms held him tightly. “I 
won’t send you away—but whether we are right 
or not, and what is going to happen to us, nobody 
knows.” 


THE END 













































































































































































































